IRS Pilots Program To Improve Practitioner Priority Service® Line
The IRS has launched a pilot program utilizing speech recognition on its Practitioner Priority Service® (PPS) phone line.
The program is intended to target services that use bots in the queues for IRS help lines. Customers of these services pay to swap places with a bot at the front of the queue. This has led to longer hold times for practitioners or the inability to speak with an IRS representative at all. The IRS said the new program should reduce unnecessary time on hold for practitioners who call the PPS line.
The pilot program uses speech recognition to help ensure that a person is calling and not a mechanical device such as an autodialer. PPS callers are required to repeat phrases before being transferred to an IRS representative. Callers who successfully repeat a phrase are transferred, while those who cannot are disconnected. The IRS said it anticipates that high-volume or autodialer calls will be disconnected because they typically cannot speak phrases without making a significant investment in technology.