One of the most frustrating aspects of interactive voice response systems (IVR) from a user perspective is when the system doesn’t know it is unable to help us.

What we dislike about IVR is when it feels “dumb,” basically. What we really want is an IVR experience that mirrors (or beats!) interaction with a live person.

IVR already makes sense when we as customers are feeling antisocial and don’t actually want to talk with a live person. But when we are not being antisocial, a live person usually is preferable because while voice recognition is getting dramatically better than the days of old, speech understanding is still a skill that IVR has not mastered.

But that’s changing.

“We've finally reached the point where the promise of the technology has been met. Computer speech understanding may never reach the full capabilities of humans, but it has clearly passed the level of high utility," noted Bill Scholz, president of the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS).

While speech understanding technology is still developing, its application already is bearing fruit. The technology doesn’t need to understand speech 100 percent to be useful now for customer service.

"Speech recognition, particularly natural language speech, is helping more companies every day to improve their customer experience and lower their costs,” according to Bruce Pollock, vice-president at West Interactive (News - Alert). “A well-designed speech system helps to improve self-service resolution, and also helps to ensure that if a caller needs to get to an agent, they are transferred quickly and easily to the most suitable agent to get help.”

Current IVR technology can be quite powerful when paired with an integrated, multi-channel customer communication strategy that includes the web, SMS, agent and others.

And it only will get better as speech understanding evolves.

“Intelligent agents must apply knowledge about the real world, knowledge about the user, knowledge about the current context, knowledge about the meaning and structure of natural language, and be able to determine when they can not respond to a request correctly,” noted James Larson, vice president of Larson Technical Services (News - Alert). “It will take much insight and user testing to build useful intelligent agents, they can't be built overnight.”

But built they will be, and soon IVR will make Siri and Google (News - Alert) Now look artificial by comparison.