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Interactive Voice Response

For users with a straightforward enquiry, make it quick for them by offering an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service. This tutorial will walk you through building an application to do exactly that with text-to-speech (TTS) prompts and keypad input.

The scenario is this: a customer phones a delivery company to find out the status of their order. They will be prompted to enter their order number and then hear a spoken response letting them know the (randomly generated by our example code) status of their order.

This tutorial is based on the IVR use case. All the code is available on GitHub.

In this tutorial

Setting Up for IVR

In order to work through this tutorial you need:

  • A Vonage account.
  • The Nexmo CLI installed and set up.
  • A publicly accessible PHP web server so that Vonage can make webhook requests to your app, or for local development we recommend ngrok.
  • The tutorial code, either clone the repository or download and extract the zip file to your machine.
  • Learn how to use ngrok

Create a Voice Application

A Vonage application contains the security and configuration information you need to connect to Vonage endpoints and use our products. You make calls to a Vonage product using the security information in the application. When the call connects, Vonage communicates with your webhook endpoints so you can manage your call.

You can use Nexmo CLI to create an application for Voice API by using the following command and replacing the YOUR_URL segments with the URL of your own application:

nexmo app:create phone-menu YOUR_URL/answer YOUR_URL/event
Application created: 5555f9df-05bb-4a99-9427-6e43c83849b8

This command uses the app:create command to create a new app. The parameters are:

  • phone-menu - the name you give to this application
  • YOUR_URL/answer - when you receive an inbound call to your Vonage number, Vonage makes a GET request and retrieves the NCCO that controls the call flow from this webhook endpoint
  • YOUR_URL/event - as the call status changes, Vonage sends status updates to this webhook endpoint

The command returns the UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) that identifies your application - you might like to copy and paste this as we will need it later.

Buy a phone number

To handle inbound calls to your application, you need a number from Vonage. If you already have a number to use, jump to the next section to associate the existing number with your application.

You can use the Nexmo CLI to buy the phone number:

nexmo number:buy --country_code GB --confirm
Number purchased: 441632960960

The number:buy command allows you to specify which country the number should be in, using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 format. By specifying --confirm as well, we don't need to confirm the choice of number, the first available one will be purchased.

Now we can set up the phone number to point to the application you created earlier.

Link phone numbers to the Vonage Application

Next you will link each phone number with the phone-menu application you created. When any event occurs relating to a number associated with an application, Vonage sends a web request to your webhook endpoints with information about the event. To do this, use the link:app command in the Nexmo CLI:

nexmo link:app 441632960960 5555f9df-05bb-4a99-9427-6e43c83849b8

The parameters are the phone number you want to use and the UUID returned when you created a voice application earlier.

Try it yourself!

There's a detailed walkthrough of the code sample but for the impatient, let's try the application before we dive in too deeply. You should have your number and application created and linked from the above instructions; now we'll grab and run the code.

Start by cloning the repository if you haven't already.

In the project directory, install the dependencies with Composer:

composer install

Copy the config.php.dist to config.php and edit it to add your base URL (the same URL that you used when setting up the application above).

If you're using ngrok, it randomly generates a tunnel URL. It can be helpful to start ngrok before doing the other configuration so that you know what URL your endpoints will be on (paid ngrok users can reserve tunnel names). It might also be useful to know that there is a nexmo app:update command if you need update the URLs you set at any time

All set? Then start up the PHP webserver:

php -S 0:8080 ./public/index.php

Once it's running, call your Vonage number and follow the instructions! The code receives webhooks to /event as the call is started, ringing, etc. When the system answers the call, a webhook comes in to /answer and the code responds with some text-to-speech and then waits for user input. The user's input then arrives by webhook to /search and again the code responds with some text-to-speech.

Now you've seen it in action, you may be curious to know how the various elements work. Read on for a full walkthrough of our PHP code and how it manages the flow of the call...

Handle an Inbound Call

When Vonage receives an inbound call to your Vonage number it makes a request to the event webhook endpoint you set when you created a Voice application. A webhook is also sent each time DTMF input is collected from the user.

This tutorial code uses a small router to handle these inbound webhooks. The router determines the requested URI path and uses it to map the caller's navigation through the phone menu - the same as URLs in web application.

Data from webhook body is captured and passed in the request information to the Menu:

<?php

// public/index.php

require_once __DIR__ . '/../bootstrap.php';

$uri = ltrim(strtok($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"],'?'), '/');
$data = file_get_contents('php://input');

Vonage sends a webhook for every change in call status. For example, when the phone is ringing, the call has been answered or is complete. The application uses a switch() statement to log the data received by the /event endpoint for debug purposes. Every other request goes to the code that handles the user input. Here is the code:

<?php

// public/index.php

switch($uri) {
    case 'event':
        error_log($data);
        break;
    default:
        $ivr = new \NexmoDemo\Menu($config);
        $method = strtolower($uri) . 'Action';

        $ivr->$method(json_decode($data, true));

        header('Content-Type: application/json');
        echo json_encode($ivr->getStack());
}

Any request that is not for /event is mapped to an Action method on the Menu object. Incoming request data is passed to that method. The router retrieves the NCCO (Nexmo Call Control Object) and sends it in the response as a JSON body with the correct Content-Type.

The $config array is passed to the Menu object, as it needs to know the base URL for the application when generating NCCOs that could include callback URLs:

<?php

// src/Menu.php

public function __construct($config)
{
    $this->config = $config;
}

Generate NCCOs

A Call Control Object (NCCO) is a JSON array that is used to control the flow of a Voice API call. Vonage expects your answer webhook to return an NCCO to control the various stages of the call.

To manage NCCOs this example application uses array manipulation and a few methods.

The router handles encoding to JSON, the Menu object provides access to the NCCO stack with its getStack() method:

<?php

// src/Menu.php

public function getStack()
{
    return $this->ncco;
}

There are also some helper methods to provide the foundation for managing the NCCO stack. You may find these useful in your own applications:

<?php

// src/Menu.php

protected function append($ncco)
{
    array_push($this->ncco, $ncco);
}

protected function prepend($ncco)
{
    array_unshift($this->ncco, $ncco);
}

Send text-to-speech greeting

Vonage sends a webhook to the /answer endpoint of the application when the call is answered. The routing code sends this to the answerAction() method of the Menu object, which begins by adding an NCCO containing a greeting.

<?php

// src/Menu.php

public function answerAction()
{
    $this->append([
        'action' => 'talk',
        'text' => 'Thanks for calling our order status hotline.'
    ]);

    $this->promptSearch();
}

This is a great example of how to return a text-to-speech message.

Request user input via IVR (Interactive Voice Response)

For our example application, the user needs to supply their order ID. For this part, first add another "talk" NCCO to the prompt (if the greeting was included, you'd greet the user every time we asked them for their order number). The next NCCO is where the user's input is received:

<?php

// src/Menu.php

protected function promptSearch()
{
    $this->append([
        'action' => 'talk',
        'text' => 'Using the numbers on your phone, enter your order number followed by the pound sign'
    ]);

    $this->append([
        'action' => 'input',
        'eventUrl' => [$this->config['base_path'] . '/search'],
        'timeOut' => '10',
        'submitOnHash' => true
    ]);
}

The eventUrl option in your NCCO is used to specify where to send the webhook when the user has entered their data. This is essentially the same thing you do with the action property of a HTML <form>. This is where the $config array and the base URL are used.

A few other input specific properties are used. timeOut gives the user more time to enter the order number and submitOnHash lets them avoid waiting by ending their order ID with the pound sign (that's a hash symbol '#' for all you British English speakers).

Respond to user input

After the user has provided input, Vonage sends a webhook to the eventUrl defined in the input. Since we set the eventUrl to /search, our code routes the request to searchAction. The request includes a dtmf field which contains the numbers input by the user. We use this input data and randomly generate example data to return to the user, your applications will probably do something much more useful such as fetch information from a database. Here's the action:

<?php

// src/Menu.php

public function searchAction($request)
{
    if(isset($request['dtmf'])) {
        $dates = [new \DateTime('yesterday'), new \DateTime('today'), new \DateTime('last week')];
        $status = ['shipped', 'backordered', 'pending'];

        $this->append([
            'action' => 'talk',
            'text' => 'Your order ' . $this->talkCharacters($request['dtmf'])
                      . $this->talkStatus($status[array_rand($status)])
                      . ' as  of ' . $this->talkDate($dates[array_rand($dates)])
        ]);
    }

    $this->append([
        'action' => 'talk',
        'text' => 'If you are done, hangup at any time. If you would like to search again'
    ]);

    $this->promptSearch();
}

As you can see from the search action, the sample application sends some rather silly data back to the user! There is an NCCO that includes the order number from the incoming dtmf data field, a random order status and a random date (today, yesterday or a week ago) as a spoken "update". In your own application, there would probably be some more logical, err, logic.

Once the order information is passed to the user, they are told that they can hang up at anytime. The method that adds the order prompt NCCO is reused. That way the user can search for another order, but does not hear the welcome prompt every time.

Tips for better Text-To-Speech experiences

The Menu class has a few more methods that are there to improve the process of turning application data into spoken prompts. Examples in this application include:

  • the date when the status was last reported
  • the order number
  • the order status

We have methods to assist us in communicating these values to the user. First: the talkDate method returns a string with a date format that works well for spoken words.

<?php

// src/Menu.php

protected function talkDate(\DateTime $date)
{
    return $date->format('l F jS');
}

The talkCharacters method puts a space between each character in a string, so they are read individually. We use this when reporting the order number:

<?php

// src/Menu.php

protected function talkCharacters($string)
{
    return implode(' ', str_split($string));
}

The talkStatus method converts a very terse constant into a more conversational phrase using a lookup:

<?php

// src/Menu.php

protected function talkStatus($status)
{
    switch($status){
        case 'shipped':
            return 'has been shipped';
        case 'pending':
            return 'is still pending';
        case 'backordered':
            return 'is backordered';
        default:
            return 'can not be located at this time';
    }
}

Conclusion

Now you've built a interactive phone menu that both collects input from the user, and responds with (albeit fake) information. Instead of using the talk NCCO to inform the user, a connect NCCO could forward the call to a particular department, or a record NCCO could capture a voicemail from the user.

Next Steps

Here are a few more resources that could be useful for building this type of application:

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