Now a days, very often one gets to hear the term ‘Cloud Telephony’, but what exactly is this ‘Cloud Telephony’ and why is it relevant or important in the field of IVR ?

What is Cloud Telephony ?

In IVR, point of view, in a single sentence, Hosted IVR or IVR Hosting service where user can design, deploy their own IVR or Telephony Applications themselves is Cloud Telephony! Most probably, It has got its name to sound similar with ‘Cloud Computing’ and to bridge the gap between specialised telephony application developer with general computer/web application developer! And at the end, ‘Cloud Telephony’ does exactly that, it empowers any computer application developer to add Telephony functionality to their software applications!

Cloud Telephony means, you do not have to deal with telephony jargons, knowledge of how telephone works as long as you know what you want your telephone to do! And most of the time, it is pretty simple for everyone to understand, make/receive(pick up) a telephone call, hang up or disconnect the call, play an audio file, transfer the call, conference the call! With Cloud Telephony, these kind of telephony functions can be added to any computer application!

Cloud Telephony offers many advantages

Cloud Telephony offers many advantages over traditional on-premise telephony applications. Traditional on-premise telephony applications typically consisted of PBX, IVR and lot of wires through MDF ( Main Distribution Frame)! IVR application is the only visible computer application which provides software like function and computational capabilities! IVR could pick up an incoming call, play a greeting, ask to dial extension number, transfer the call, if the transferred number did not pick up the call, ask the caller to record voice mail!

All these kind of telephony functions ( and much more!) are now available which can be integrated with any computer applications without knowing about telecom technology or worry about telecom infrastructure like PBX/IVR!

Typically, in a cloud telephony, few hundred lines of coding is enough to provide above functions. One can just subscribe to Cloud Telephony service provider with monthly subscription fee, or actual usage basis, use their API in his own applications! With standardization of VXML, a user can become truly independent of coud telephony vendor or hosted IVR provider!

IVR and Cloud Telephony

I would actually wish to view Cloud Telephony as IVR 2.0 which have graduated from specific telecom domain to web domain like any other computer applications! Cloud Telephony or bringing IVR to the web world, has given a new and fresh lease of life to the aging world of IVR!

With cloud telephony, one can hope to find any interesting and innovative telephony application to appear, solving real world problems and serving diverse population!

Tropo, Twilio and India’s own Kookoo are few of the could telephony providers where one can play around with their applications by adding telephony functions!

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Originally from IVR World