About Us

Welcome to the MTI Blog!

Who we are…
Message Technologies, Inc, (better known as MTI), is not a startup or an upstart. In fact we have been answering phones on behalf of other companies for nearly 25 years. We started as answering service and in fact still support many customers that we signed up 25 years ago with the same agents that were employed when the company began! In 1993 we saw the need to grow our business beyond live agents and implemented some of the earliest IVR solutions out there. In fact, our very first IVR customer, Buckmasters, continues to be a customer today.

What we do…
As the millennium turned, standards emerged. As the Internet, HTML and eventually XML gained widespread adoption, Voice XML / VXML became the defacto standard for developing IVR applications. We recognized this early on and implemented VXML 1.0 solutions in partnership with VoiceGenie who, now under the Genesys brand controls the lion’s share of the VXML usage in the market today.

Using speech recognition as part of your IVR has also come a along way. We tinkered with the technology back in the 90’s but it really was not ready. We strategically placed speech prompts in early 2000 and found that if we were careful it actually will work. Today, with huge grammars and faster servers, SLMs and keyword spotting, we now rarely deploy an IVR application that contains no speech recognition. But we know that getting from A to B does not always take a Maserati, so we still pick and choose with care.

We also saw that implementing standards based, fully redundant, highly available IVR speech solutions was too expensive a proposition for most companies. So in parallel with adopting VXML, we decided to build a robust data center that allows companies to host their IVR applications outside of their own facilities. Yes, we were early in that game, but as we all know, outsourcing is no longer a buzzword for the few companies that still send calls to India!. Today outsourcing has become an integral part of the decision making process for most IT projects today

How and why we do it…
So that’s the role of the MTI Blog…we will be blogging about best practices for designing IVR solutions, when to use Speech Recognition, why many IVR systems still make callers cringe, how to outsource your IVR system and still save money, and lots more fun topics. Our goal is to help you peel back the Hosting, IVR and Speech Recognition “onion” and with a little luck provide enlightenment and encouragement to both rookies and olds pros alike. Welcome!