My Wife has an IVR-killing Superpower

A couple of months ago we dropped our traditional landline and began using the AT&T U-verse voice service. Shortly after that I discovered my wife’s unusual superpower.  It started innocently enough - we chat on the phone a few times during a day. That’s normal, right?

I should mention my wife is a multi-tasker and has a habit of resting the cordless phone on her shoulder as she types on a keyboard, rinses dishes, or performs an appendectomy. Often her cheek or chin would touch the keypad and voila, I would hear random touch tones.

After our switch to U-verse, I began thinking my wife was really leaning on the phone. I would hear two, three, or four tones in every call.

My complaints were met with firm denials and that’s when we figured it out: her voice triggers U-verse touch tones! She does not hear the tones. They are produced in the network in response to her voice. Is this an odd in-band signal problem?

It seems to be related to vowels; it’s not sensitive to volume, thankfully, so I am spared additional tones during our occasional debates about global warming or whether the right person was eliminated from “So You Think You Can Dance.”

Unfortunately, she has yet to master her superpower, so my requests to hear “Jingle Bells” or Iron Butterfly’s “Inagodadavida” go unfulfilled.

But as someone deeply involved in IVR services, I am struck by how her superpower can wipe out an IVR program. Imagine an application that allows a free-form recording of a consumer problem. In many cases, the recording can be stopped by pressing a touch-tone. Imagine the irritation generated when the consumer is recording a complaint and is interrupted by the IVR program as it prematurely moves to the next dialog after the recording.

Is this an isolated problem or is this something to be expected in our new world of hybrid traditional and SIP telephony? Is it time to change the default value of the dtmfterm attribute (of the <record> tag) from ”true” to “false”?

My wife’s talent is not yet listed on www.superpowerlist.com, but I am sure it will be soon. Next we need to work on a cool superhero name. Any ideas?