New software designed to help integrate voice recognition, Web programs and databases.
New software designed to help integrate voice recognition, Web programs and databases
Avaya this week is announcing two software platforms to create and execute applications that answer phones and respond to spoken words to deliver information sought by callers.
The Voice Portal and Dialog Designer software works with PBXs and peripheral speech-processing programs, as well as with business databases to support custom call applications. The company plans to announce them at the SpeechTek show in New York.
Voice Portal could control the call flow of an application that checks the incoming caller ID, answers the phone with a greeting that uses the name of a person associated with that ID, authenticates the caller’s voice against a voice-print database, retrieves the information the caller requests and then performs a transaction as directed by the caller.
To do all this, Voice Portal communicates with Web servers and databases via media resource control protocol (MRSP), a standard that makes the software more flexible than platforms that use proprietary interfaces, says Elizabeth Herrell, vice president of Forrester Research. Competitors include Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, VoiceGenie Technologies, Nortel and Intervoice.
Voice-recognition software company Gold Systems in Boulder, Colo., plans to use the new Avaya platforms to create packaged applications for sale to businesses, says Herb Morreale, Gold’s CTO.
He says the company built an application that tapped Amazon. com’s Web services to access customer information via voice. “With Dialog Designer, that is very easy to do as a programmer,” he says.
Voice Portal runs on Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3.0 and can be accessed via the same VoiceXML browser used in Dialog Designer, software that developers use to create call-flow applications and test them on a PC to make sure they work, Avaya says.
Voice Portal, Dialog Designer and a current Avaya TDM voice-response platform, Interactive Response, share the same VoiceXML browser, so call applications developed on Dialog Designer don’t behave differently when they are implemented by Voice Portal, says Avery Glasser, an analyst with Opus Research. “Little differences in browsers can change how an application behaves,” he says.
Voice Portal includes Port Failover that allows standby servers to jump in if primary servers fail. Licenses for the primary server are automatically shifted to the standby server, making it unnecessary to pay for licenses that are mostly on standby, Glasser says.
Voice Portal is based on IP and supports Session Initiation Protocol and H.323 VoIP equipment. This means that businesses could issue wireless phones rather than laptops to mobile employees and they still could access data they need from corporate servers, Herrell says. Voice Portal also could save money by eliminating live call agents. “Anytime you’re automating a service, it costs a lot less than having human assistance on the other end,” she says.
Voice Portal costs $900 per port, and Dialog Designer comes with it for free. Customers of Avaya’s Interactive Response software who have a maintenance contract can swap for Voice Portal at no extra charge.
