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The usability of touch-tone Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems is dismal. Clients would rather speak to a contact centre agent than navigate through the menu structure found in these systems. Contact centres, due to a variety of reasons, most notably high personnel costs, tend to utilise IVR as their solution for automation. IVR is an example of a simple forward chaining rule based expert system. An evaluation was conducted to determine whether a natural language interface would provide a more effective automation technique in comparison to current techniques utilised by contact centres. This evaluation compared the advantages and disadvantages of a natural language interface and a rule based expert system interface (modelled to resemble an IVR) and concluded that a hybrid system utilising a combination of these techniques would provide a better solution. This paper discusses two models that could be employed in the combination of a rule based expert system with a natural language interface.
Sankar et al. (Mon,) studied this question.