Business drivers and design choices for multilingual IVRs: a government service delivery case study

Multilingual emerging markets hold many opportunities for the application of spoken language technologies, such as interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Designing such systems requires an in-depth understanding of the business drivers and salient design decisions pertaining to these markets. In this paper we analyze the business drivers and design issues for a voice service (the School Meals Line) piloted in the public sector. We find that cost saving, increased customer satisfaction and improved access to services and information are the primary business drivers for this use case. The main design issues we identify for this use case, and discuss, are language offering, persona design and input modality. Index Terms — Business drivers, VUI design, spoken language technologies, voice services, ICT for development, multilingual emerging markets