Qwest has launched a development portal designed to help companies roll out voice-enabled applications easily and inexpensively.
Called Qwest Development Network, the portal supplies subscribing companies with development tools, technical support and access to network services required to design, test and launch applications with interactive voice response and speech-recognition features.
The portal is tied to Qwest Web Contact Center, a Web-based platform that routes and processes voice applications. By reserving voice ports on the Qwest gear, companies can avoid having to buy, deploy and maintain their own interactive voice response (IVR) hardware, says Alex Danyluk, senior director of Qwest Solutions.
Development Network is based on VoiceXML ( VXML), an extension to the XML document-formatting standard that streamlines development of voice-driven applications for retrieving Web content.
VXML lets users navigate Web content via telephone commands. In the same way that customers use a Web browser to access data contained in corporate directories and databases, with a VXML-based voice application, callers can retrieve data from the same sources via spoken commands or keypad entries.
In the Qwest setup, the service provider takes responsibility for the heavy lifting. Qwest’s infrastructure supports touch-tone detection and speech-recognition technologies from Nuance and Speechworks, and it integrates with advanced call routers such as Genesys and Cisco’s ICM Computer Telephony Integration platforms. It acts as a middleman between customers and the company’s Web server, translating a customer’s spoken query into text, forwarding it to a corporate Web server, then converting the Web server’s reply from text to speech for delivery over the telephone.
What Qwest doesn’t do is the VXML application design and development, which is left to a company’s staff.
Danyluk says that separation makes sense. “We’ve disaggregated the application from the network solution,” he says. “Many customers have feared giving their application up to a network service provider. VXML takes that fear away, because the company retains application control.”
Customers develop their voice applications in a Web server environment, which means they can use the same tools they use to develop Web applications and the same tools they use to link Web applications to internal systems and databases, he says.
“A customer probably already has a Web tool that provides order confirmation information, for example, and interacts with back-end systems,” Danyluk says. “So that customer can releverage the existing code – write an application once in a Web environment, and leverage it for both the Web and the IVR world.”
The Qwest setup lets companies start small and pilot a voice application without much capital investment – just roughly $200 for a development port, Danyluk says. As usage grows, companies can reserve more ports from Qwest, he says. Once a voice application is in production, port prices vary depending on the voice features supported.
