How Should Users Convey Their Location to an Interactive Voice Response System?

In this paper, we evaluate various ways in which users can indicate their location while using an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service. Using an IVR survey, 71 low-income users of a live IVR service in India conveyed their location in three different ways: a postal code, a fixed line area code, and a free response. In each configuration, users spoke their location and a human transcribed the result, thereby eliminating any dependence on DTMF input proficiency or speech recognition accuracy. The analysis of survey responses suggests that people are aware and capable of representing their location with a postal code and fixed line area code. However, using the free response data as ground truth, there was higher accuracy using fixed-line area codes (72% answered correctly) versus postal codes (55% answered correctly). Since area codes are more coarse grained than postal codes in India, this result implies a tradeoff between granularity and success rate in collecting location data over IVR.