On the phone
IVR, short for Interactive Voice Response, is the phone menu that asks a caller to press one for sales and two for support. It routes calls by keypress, or by a short spoken command matched against a fixed script. The caller navigates the menu; the menu does not understand the caller.
Also called: Interactive Voice Response · Phone menu · Press one for sales
An IVR menu makes the caller do the sorting. The options are written around the company's departments rather than the caller's problem, the right branch is often two levels down, and a request that fits no branch has nowhere to go. The common outcome is a caller pressing zero to reach anybody at all.
An AI phone assistant replaces the menu with a question. The caller says what they need in their own words and the assistant acts on it, so there is no tree to navigate and no wrong branch to back out of. Routing still happens, but the software does it instead of the caller.
Last checked 2026-09-23
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