Moderated by Quinn Weaver, Fairpath Communications

An IVR (for "integrated voice response") is the voice menu system you get when you call your bank or your ISP. Most IVRs are a pain. What if the menus could reorder themselves so the most commonly picked items appeared first? What if they could present different information (e.g. bank hours) according to the day of the week? What if you could use a real programming language to write IVRs with arbitrary dynamic behavior? What if it were open-source?

Dido is all that. It is a full programming system for dynamic IVRs, using Perl. It uses a simple, easy-to-follow XML syntax to represent menu hierarchies, with embedded Perl for dynamically generated content. The syntax is reminiscent of Web templates, and the simile is appropriate: Dido is to traditional IVRs what mod_perl is to a static Web page.

In this talk, I will discuss Dido in detail, take questions, and demo a working IVR.