This application generally relates to communications and, more particularly, to messaging and to message synthesis.
Prompting systems are very popular in today's communications environment. These prompting systems, such as an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, quickly direct a user to a particular department, extension, or information. These prompting systems, additionally, are an efficient and less expensive method of resolving customer inquiries. Although a minority of users lament the loss of human operators, most users are satisfied with the faster customer service offered by today's prompting systems.
While prompting systems are great for both businesses and users, prompting systems often become stale. That is, the menu of prompts becomes outdated or even wrong. Because business budgets are often tight, only rarely will the menu of prompts be analyzed and compared to current needs. The budget must also fund one or more software programmers to reconfigure the menu of prompts to reflect the update. (The user then often hears the standard message “Please pay careful attention—our menu items have changed.”) Because most businesses, however, only rarely budget money to review and to modify the menu of prompts, the menu of prompts is often outdated. Menus may be so outdated that they sometimes result in a frustrating “dead end.” What is needed, then, is a prompting system that automatically updates itself, reducing the need for human analysis and reconfiguration.