A lot has been going on in the interactive voice response (IVR) space. From new releases to the latest trends and insights, this is all of the most interesting IVR-related news of the week!

This week, it was revealed that in an effort to deliver a next-generation speech platform for decreased costs and improved physician productivity, Compressus has integrated M*Modal’s speech understanding technology with its MedxConnect suite of healthcare interoperability and workflow solutions. According to Compressus, a company specializing in solutions for the healthcare IT market, this integration will lessen enterprise expansion costs as well as improve patient care and safety, among other things.

"M*Modal's expertise in speech recognition and cloud technologies provides radiologists using Compressus solutions with incredible flexibility, accuracy and time savings in creating workflows and reporting," explained Michael Finke, president M*Modal, in a statement.

In other IVR news, IBM (News - Alert) has revealed an all-new, revolutionary language translation technology. Recently, the company demonstrated a software engine that boasted translation of any spoken language almost instantaneously –all while preserving such things as the speaker’s intonation and rhythm. 

One industry that will particularly benefit from this innovation is the call center, which is becoming increasingly globalized. “With companies becoming more globalized than ever and call centers outsourcing to foreign nations becoming more widespread, the need for effective machine translation is great,” adds Tracey Schelmetic.

Closing out this week’s IVR community news is a part-two article to a recent Plum Voice blog stressing the importance of an effectively designed and executed IVR application. For companies that are looking to facilitate effective customer communications – which should be all of us – ensuring that your IVR solution mirrors the capabilities of your live operators is vital.

Some additional things to look for in an effective IVR, the article continues, are an easy-to-dial-in system boasting logical methods for customer interaction. “When concise call flows are lacking in the IVR system, for example, end users can easily become frustrated, especially if they are stuck in recurring call patterns that fail to route them to the appropriate destination,” writes Susan Campbell in the piece.

Additionally, the system has to be properly monitored and its data must be analyzed to continue improving the experience by implementing processes that cater to customers’ exact wants and needs.

That’s going to do it this week for the latest IVR news. To see what’s new next week, be sure to check back in same time, same place – only here at TMCnet.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.