Use Homophones For Test Accuracy

Overview

IVR testing relies upon automatic speech recognition (ASR) to translate the spoken response from the IVR into text.

Speech recognition, though, is imperfect. To correct this, we leverage homophones to correct errors in the text generated by the ASR. The good news is that even though ASR is imperfect, it is usually consistent. So if we correct something once, it will stay corrected as we run our test.

Adding A Homophone

Note that in our first test the "Expected Response" is "welcome to the spoken airlines". However, if you actually listen to the call recording, you will hear that it is actually saying "welcome to Bespoken airlines".

Let's add a homophone to correct this:

• Click "Advanced"
• Hover over the Homophones section (about 2/3 way down the panel)
• Enter "Bespoken" for the key and "the spoken" for the values
• Scroll down and click "Ok"
• Go to the first "Expected Response" - change "the spoken" to "Bespoken"
• Click "Run"

By adding the homophone, we correct the actual response coming back from the system.

Now that we have added our homophones, we can look in more depth at how we generate our utterances, via Text-To-Speech voices.