IVR can be amazing stuff.  Especially when the idea and the design of the IVR system is put in the hands of someone who has never built an IVR application and who’s mind isn’t governed and constrained by the conventional wisdom that says what an IVR can and can’t be or can and can’t do.  Thus was the goal of ESD.051: Engineering Innovation and Design, a class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Engineering.  Taught by Blade Kotelly, an IVR industry vet and author of a book on speech-recognition interface design titled The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, and MIT Professor Joel Schindall, the course was designed to teach students how to think through the process, design and build of an engineering project of any kind.  With heavy emphasis on designing and building a useful voice-based application, Angel.com donated the necessary tools to the students to accomplish their tasks.

Though the course was taught previously, there had been a reliance on the students to either know complex VXML coding or to learn VXML on the fly during the course of the semester.  This provided both a time and knowledge hurdle for those students in accomplishing their goals.  After seeing a demo of Angel.com’s on-demand WYSIWYG Site Builder toolkit, Blade knew he had something very special in IVR design tools that would lead to much greater success in his class.  And that it did.

“If Apple made an interface for designing speech applications, it would be the Angel.com Site Builder toolkit. There’s no better tool for designing voice applications,” said Blade Kotelly. ” “It’s as easy to use as my iPhone.  In fact, I had students with zero coding experience producing applications in minutes, so I had to make the homework assignments more difficult! This is truly an amazing tool that has been trans-formative with my students.”

Here is just a sampling of the unique voice applications built by MIT college students:

• The “MITchell Partymann” Facebook Party App: The students created a compelling persona named “MITchell Partymann” that Facebook users can invite to their parties.  They then created a phone application that allows users to call from any phone while they’re out around town/campus, to find out where the parties are.  Any event that MITchell Partyman is invited to is accessible through the phone app, and all of the relevant data elements about the party are pulled out of the Facebook invite page and played over the phone.
• Foursquare Voice: Allows users to interact with the location-based social networking website, Foursquare, to connect with their friends in real time. Check-in, earn badges, hear tips, keep a to-do list, find friends and even record messages for Twitter, Facebook and iPhone all through the phone.
• The “Echo” To Do List Manager: Enables users to call a phone number and set up to do lists, shopping lists, etc.  The voice app uses an integration with Vlingo to convert speech to text, then stores the lists in a SQL database.  Users are then able to check items off when complete.
• “Car Talk” Remote Control Car Application: Using web services and an Ardunio chip to talk to a controller that sends signals to an RC car, callers can speak commands through a phone (such as “turn left” and “go forward”) that direct the car.

All of these voice applications, and many more were created within a few weeks using Angel.com.  The use of Angel.com and the time saved on creating the IVR applications was invaluable, allowing students to build even more robust integrations, more detailed call flows, and to spend more time on the creative and business presentation aspects of their projects, rather than the programming.

Held as a Spring and Fall semester class within the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program — a selective program for MIT undergraduate engineering students — the lab gave 45 MIT students the opportunity to design next-generation voice user interface (VUI) applications for consumers.  The class was so successful this semester through the use of Angel.com that requests for enrollment in the class for Fall semester have doubled.

“This class was such a huge success that students have joined the Gordon program because of it,” notes Kotelly.  “Students couldn’t stop talking about the IVR solutions they were building, which lead other students to get excited about the opportunity to do the same.  We will certainly be asking Angel.com for their help in supplying our students with access to Site Builder in all future classes.  We can’t wait to see how the bar is raised next semester on the types of apps they will develop.”

Good luck to the next round of students.  We can’t wait to see what you develop either!