ComReg has published the Irish Text Relay Service (ITRS) Take-up and Usage statistics report for the period July – December 2023.
The Irish Text Relay Service (ITRS) ensures that those of us who are deaf, hard-of-hearing or speech-impaired, are able to make and receive calls independently. ITRS is available to customers of Eir, Sky, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone.
The following infographic contains an overview of the report. An accessible pdf version of the infographic is available by clicking here.
How ITRS works
For the text to voice service:
- a deaf or speech impaired person types,
- an ITRS Assistant talks, and
- a hearing person listens.
For the voice to text service:
- a hearing person talks,
- an ITRS Assistant types, and
- a deaf or speech impaired person reads.
Take up and usage statistics
Volumes indicate a 3% increase in text to voice calls between 2022 and 2023.
Volumes also indicate a 26% decrease in voice to text calls for the same period.
The following table contains the take up and usage statistics for text to voice and voice to text from 2020 to 2023.
| Calls and Texts | Text to Voice | Voice to Text |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 3,352 | 96 |
| 2022 | 3,249 | 130 |
| 2021 | 3,772 | 240 |
| 2020 | 4,090 | 58 |
Quality of Service Indicators
Abandoned calls means the rate at which end- users of ITRS cancel an attempt to make an ITRS call through the ITRS service. The abandoned call rate for ITRS calls is no more than 5% of calls per calendar month.
Service level is measured by the percentage of calls answered by the ITRS agent within 20 seconds of the call being made to them.
The following table contains the quality-of-service indicators for text to voice and voice to text from 2020 to 2023.
| Text to Voice | Voice to Text | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| % Abandoned | % Service Level | % Abandoned | % Service Level | |
| 2023 | 0.51% | 97.18% | 1.19% | 97% |
| 2022 | 2.29% | 93.11% | 2.08% | 96.61% |
| 2021 | 3.10% | 93.69% | 1.98% | 97.98% |
| 2020 | 0.31% | 95.15% | 4.17% | 93.02% |
For further information, visit itrs.ie.
ITRS opening hours are:
08:30-18:30 Monday-Thursday
09:00-21:00 Friday and Saturday
10:00-18:00 Sunday and Public Holidays
