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

This week, SpeechStorm (News - Alert), the leading provider of hosted speech recognition applications, revealed that its Payment Capture application was validated against the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI (News - Alert)-SSC).

“As customers, we all trust that organizations will use and store our data in a responsible way. Merchants must comply with industry regulations or face being fined. An off-the-shelf solution that is already validated is the fastest and most effective way for an organization to meet security standards compliance, and is especially important at a time when the level of card fraud demands we do all in our power to prevent it,” said SpeechStorm CEO and co-founder, Oliver Lennon in a statement.

In other news, iCookbook unveiled its new app for the iPhone (News - Alert), the CROCK-POT Recipes App, which boasts voice recognition software that enables users to cook hands-free. iCookbook’s CROCK-POTRecipes serves as the official app for the original brand of CROCK-POT Slow Cookers, providing more than 250 easy-to-prepare recipes for your slow cooker, even offering free monthly bonus recipes, appetizers and desserts. Users can even add their own recipes to the mix. The app is $3.99 and is available on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPHone 5, iPod touch (third and fifth generation) and the iPad..

Wrapping up this week is news of how IVR can help cure – or prevent the spreading of – the flu. IVR technology boasts plenty of useful capabilities to help individuals spread awareness when highly contagious sick periods roll around, like right now in the winter. For example, IVR dramatically helped one region in reporting and helping assist those with the swine flu. To learn more, read the entire report here.

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

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