Telephone Interface for the Email Service

Several studies have demonstrated the advantages of using IVR (Interactive Voice Response) technologies, which allow the users to phone a computer and access services by pressing the appropriate touch-tone keys on their telephones. Because it offers substantial benefits in terms of cost and time efficiency, there is a continuous pursuit for increased automation using IVR. The real challenge lies in providing a user-friendly, yet cost-effective interface to users in order to improve their interaction with existing services, making them more usable and useful, providing an experience that fits their specific objectives and utilization contexts. This paper describes a method and system for providing customizable audio access to email messages kept in several IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) backstorages using an IVR application that takes full advantage of TTS (TextTo-Speech) software.