IVR
Interactive voice response — a phone system that presents a caller with a fixed set of options, usually by keypad or a short spoken word, and acts on whatever they select.
The defining feature is the branch, not the automation: an IVR offers a small, fixed list of paths and waits for a caller to pick one, rather than listening to an open-ended request. Early systems relied on keypad tones because a tone is unambiguous in a way speech historically wasn't; later systems added basic word recognition on top of the same branching structure.
A caller wants to ask whether a side can be swapped before deciding to order at all. A classic phone tree offers hours, ordering, or a person — none obviously covers “a question before I've decided” — so the caller guesses and ends up inside a flow built for someone who already knows what they want.
The most common mix-up is treating “automated” and “IVR” as the same thing — the branching menu is the defining feature, not whether a machine is answering. A phone tree also isn't simply worse in every respect: for a narrow, structured step like entering a card number, a keypad press is more reliable than voice recognition.
Dohos's voice channel doesn't present a numbered menu at all — the one deliberate exception is card entry, where the system falls back to something IVR-shaped on purpose, covered on Calls.
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