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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

I was looking at creating an IVR monitoring tool. I would like to 1-make a call every hour, 2-record the response, and ideally 3-verify the response matches the expected. Thoughts? It looks like twilio and tropi might be able to do this (although I wasn't sure they weren't more focused on inbound), but the 1 cent price is prohibitive for what people might pay per-month especially at higher monitoring frequencies. Anyone have other solutions that are reasonably simple?

edit: If I did run adhearsion/asterisk, what do I just have to connect it to a phone line? Vague on the setup needed to do this...

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Disclaimer: I'm one of Nu echo's founders and lead architect for our IVR testing and monitoring tool suite (NuBot and Mirador).

Our Mirador IVR application monitoring service is exactly what you are looking for. It is one thing to regularly call a given number - which can indeed be hacked quite easily using either Tropo, Asterisk, etc, it is another thing to send daily, weekly, monthly and yearly report to reflect the actual state of the IVR application over time. Call setup time? Greeting time? Transaction failure? Call setup failure? Moreover, you probably want to get an email or SMS notification whenever a defect occurs (otherwise, what's the point of monitoring?) Plus, you probably also happen to want to get a notification for the alarm restore right? While we are at it, I am sure you want those reports available online in a secure location or as a PDF document.

You get all this with Mirador!

I have received your request this morning through our website and you should have received my reply by now ;-)

For those interested in IVR monitoring services, you should check my recent blog post where I describe what should be in a good monitoring report.

What’s in your IVR application monitoring report? http://blog.nuecho.com/2010/12/14/whats-in-your-ivr-applicat...

Enjoy!

Check out IQ Services out of Minneapolis, Minnesota provides a 100% service model with no hardware or software to purchase or the need to train your employees. This service comes with 24/7 notifications and a online portal where you can listen to all monitoring and notification calls that have been placed.

The best thing, this is done remotely like a real customer calling in taking into account outside influences you cannot test from the inside only.

1 to hundreds of calls are placed that exercise the system as many times per hour that is needed, and each call is being checked for and reported back on call quality, availability, times at each step, proper greeting and what the customer feels is important to know.

They offer a trial as well if interested. http://www.iq-services.com/heartbeat.asp

NuGram makes a product designed for just that. You could certainly build something yourself using either a hosted service like Tropo or using Asterisk, but using something purpose built may work better. We use NuGram to test things.

If you run an asterisk server the easiest way to get it hooked up to the phone network is by setting up a SIP account for it.

Thanks for the recommendations!

How is the pricing on NuGram? Is this it? http://www.grammarserver.com/welcome

I'm finding their descriptions a bit opaque. Do you remember the product name off hand? Do they host it, or do I need to look into learning what an SIP is? :-)

Grammar Server is a product they make for building and managing speech recognition grammars. It's pretty awesome, too, and any recognition grammars you create can be used with Tropo.

NuBot is the IVR testing product http://www.nuecho.com/content/view/28/147

I'm not sure of the cloud per minute pricing, but they'll likely be pretty responsive on email. They're a good group of people.

Disclaimer: I'm one of Nu echo's founders and lead architect for our IVR testing and monitoring tool suite (NuBot and Mirador).

Thanks Adam,

That is surely yet another point in favor of Tropo. They test. Using our NuBot Platform, we have load test their infrastructure with several concurrent calls. A few issues came up and Voxeo promptly fixed the issues. Case closed. Tremendous support.

I don't know about Twilio in such regard. A few months back, I have offered Twilio our load testing services but I haven't heard of them so far. Danielle, Jeff, if you read this, drop me a note (pdeschen @ nuecho dot com) and we'll be pleased to load test your infra! :-)

Pascal

NuGram (www.grammarserver.com) is a hosted platform used to host and share speech recognition grammars (both static and dynamic, i.e. grammar templates) for use by hosted IVR platforms (Tropo, Voxeo Prophecy, etc.) It's totally free, although it's not really meant for production use as of now. If you need it in production, please contact me at dominique DOT boucher AT nuecho DOT com.

From it's companion site, nugram.nuecho.com, you can also download a complete Eclipse-based grammar development environment (NuGram IDE) from which you can upload your grammars to NuGram Server.

Regarding the opacity of the site, maybe we could work on that... We are very open to constructive comments!

--Dominique (Nu Echo's CTO)

Here is a blog post on Tropo's blog that explains how to use NuGram Server from Tropo.

http://blog.tropo.com/2009/12/17/advanced-grammar-topics-for...

Yes, this is a great example of how we focus Tropo on making things easy. But then also let you do the complex things like advanced grammars for speech recognition when you need to. Simplicity mixed with depth of features.

The product you are looking for is Mirador, from Nu Echo: http://www.nuecho.com/mirador

We don't provide a complete self-service setup process yet We are working on that. Just apply for the free trial and we'll help you bootstrap the whole thing.

--Dominique (Nu Echo's CTO)

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