Digium and Metaphor Solutions announce a partnership offering its On-Demand Plug & Play IVR application suite for the Asterisk market. Plug & Play IVR allows Digium customers to use the web to self-configure, customize, deploy, manage and report on high quality speech recognition-based application packages in minutes. Metaphor’s suite of web-configurable speech recognition applications provides businesses unprecedented access to cost-effective speech IVR solutions. Small and mid-size businesses can easily configure these speech IVR solutions to connect to their on-premise or managed Asterisk IP-PBX platforms.

Speech-recognition IVR applications have been proven to increase customer satisfaction, reduce customer service cost and are preferred by callers over touch-tone applications. However, it takes a large upfront investment, specialized development skills and several months of effort to deploy a high quality speech IVR application. Metaphor Plug & Play environment lets enterprises quickly self-configure, deploy and manage high quality speech IVR customer service solutions without specialized technical expertise. Customers can use any of Metaphor IVR’s 55+ pre-built applications by configuring extensions to connect to the Metaphor Asterisk peer.

Digium is the creator and driving force behind Asterisk, the open source voice communications software deployed on more than 3.5 million servers worldwide to manage VoIP calls for businesses and individuals. Asterisk powers Digium’s family of software and hardware appliances including AsteriskNOW, Asterisk Business Edition, and Switchvox. “Speech recognition applications greatly enhance customer service solutions offered on the Asterisk IP PBX platform,” said Jim Webster, director of technology partnerships for Digium. “Metaphor’s Plug & Play Speech IVR dramatically lowers the time, cost and complexity of implementing speech IVR solutions for our small and mid-size business customers.”

Customers can run free trials and dial into live applications by visiting www.metaphorivr.com. Examples of applications include Inbound and Outbound Customer Surveys, Proactive notifications, Telephone Banking, Bill Collection, Payment by Phone, Insurance Claims Service, Order Status, Appointment Scheduling, Prescription Refill, Location Finder, Inventory, Pricing and Catalog Request.