Unless you just woke up from a coma, or returned from an extended vacation on a beautiful, remote tropical island (that would be my choice), it is impossible to ignore the avalanche of applications being written and deployed on smart phones.

iPhone leads the way in terms of great human factors design, and the speed of product acceptance is impressive. More than one million 3G iPhones were shipped in the first 3 days of introduction. In 18 months, the App Store introduced 140,000 iPhone applications (mostly personal user focused) and still counting. RIM’s Blackberry still enjoys major market share for corporate users, but clearly the iPhone is making strong inroads. Google, Palm and others are pushing hard for market share also.

So what will a smart phone IVR application look like? After all, a speech recognition application will still work with (shudder…. should I even say it?) even an old analog phone, if you can still find one.

Early applications specifically designed for a smart phone will likely be a combination of speech recognition and web integrated solutions that deliver voice information while also delivering information to be read on the display or stored for later review. Who knows, perhaps we will be able to use IVR speech commands to drive information to a smart phone web session that can be viewed while interacting with IVR systems in the not too distant future.

So how long will it be before a large volume of IVR based smart phone applications begin to roll out? The race for business applications has begun. And what about designing mobile applications that deliver information to a variety of different smart phones without having to custom write the application for each device? Solved that also.

Contact us if you would like to know more about smart phone mobile applications and how they can be effectively used. We are happy to discuss your application needs and see how we may help.