If you live or spend any time in a city with metered parking, you'll be familiar with one of the following scenarios. First, you find you have no change, which necessitates rummaging through the car seats, on the floors or in the ashtrays for quarters. Failing that, you need to run into a local business with a dollar and beg for change. Second, even if you do have correct change for the initial meter feed, your meter runs out before you're ready to leave, which means repeating the steps in the first scenario or risk a parking ticket. Finally, if you've ever fed a parking meter for the sole purpose of picking up take-out or dropping off dry-cleaning, you'll know that meters don't give change: you'll pay for an hour or two even though you required only a minute or two.

Nowadays, we can do almost everything else that involves money with technology, so why not parking meters?

Thanks to a company called Parkmobile and its technology partner VoltDelta (News - Alert), we can. VoltDelta, which provides virtual contact center systems, voice self-service solutions, and operator services, has announced that its technology is a key enabler in Parkmobile's service, which is revolutionizing parking in cities and municipalities with an innovative pay by phone “e-Parking” service. Parkmobile is a provider of services that cover all parking modes including digital permits, cashless on- and off-street parking, electronic enforcement as well as seamless integration with congestion charging.

To use the Parkmobile e-Parking service, motorists dial a toll-free number and use speech recognition to report their license plate number and initiate a credit card payment. The VoltDelta system supporting the Parkmobile application immediately identifies the caller by ANI (automatic number identification) and associates the number with the license plate registered (motorists can create an account with Parkmobile that allows them to register up to five license plates per account). The interactive voice response system will then prompt the motorist to speak the zone number, which is found on a label on the meter.

Once the meter is paid, the motorist can receive SMS reminders 15 minutes prior to the meter's expiration to pay for more time on the meter, eliminating the risk of overstaying and finding a parking ticket on the windshield. The solution uses speech recognition technology from VoltDelta that recognizes the meter zone number, eliminating the need to punch numbers into the phone manually, which often requires a person to shift their attention away from their surroundings: a significant safety risk in some urban areas. Frequent users of Parkmobile can then track their parking usage via personalized online account pages.

And the best bit? Motorists can report an end time to their use of a metered parking space, which means they pay for only what they use, eliminating wasted quarters that go into meters for parking time that is not needed.

Parkmobile is also beneficial to the municipalities that use the service: with no coins in the meter, the city need not pay as many attendants to collect coins, and it helps eliminate the time it takes to issue parking tickets. And since the solution is delivered on-demand, there is no upfront cost to municipalities that use Parkmobile. And because of the scalability of the on-demand solutions, the city can scale up or down as needed to meet demand.

Parkmobile chose VoltDelta as their technology and deployment partner for a variety of reasons. The complexity of recognizing the kinds of alpha-numeric combinations used by license plates required a voice-user interface (VUI) that was accurate and innovative, something Parkmobile found in VoltDelta's VUI. In addition, Parkmobile chose VoltDelta because of the company's well established hosting capabilities along with its carrier-grade reliability, multichannel abilities, flexibility, robust security features (critical with the input of credit card information) and international reach. Parkmobile is currently available in 11 states and the District of Columbia, with more deployments planned for the immediate future.