The why and how of voice portals

Beyond saving money for business, IT can leverage voice portals for better functionality

Major voice portal providers include Avaya, Cisco, Convergys' Intervoice unit, and Nortel. Travelocity built its voice portal application, which runs on a Tomcat application server, with Intervoice InVision Studio tools and uses a Nuance Speechworks media server for speech recognition.

IT can also roll its own voice portals using a combination of industry standards and specialized development tools offered by vendors such as OpenMethods, Syntellect, and Voxeo. Many savvy IT departments simply write their own in Java.

IVR development doesn't require many highly specialized skills

Most seasoned Web developers can start building voice portal applications fairly quickly. That's because voice portals rely heavily on a trio of standards.

The first is the W3C's VoiceXML (VXML) standard, which is an XML specification for voice and telephone keypad interactions with the Web. VXML pages are interpreted by a voice browser, much as HTML is interpreted by a Web browser. The forthcoming third version will permit similar interactions using SMS and instant messaging.

The State Chart XML (SCXML) standard looks to be a key enabler of synchronized processing of multimodal voice and Web interactions, so customers can talk to your call center on their smartphones and simultaneously use their keypad to choose from a list of options in the phone's Web browser. For example, if a customer calls an airline to find out his flight is cancelled, the voice portal can send a Web page of new flights to his smartphone, so he can book one without a live agent.

The third key standard is Call Control XML (CCXML), which handles call processing, including how to take, accept, transfer, record a call, as well as set up a conference.

It's not necessary to understand these standards in depth, as most vendors offer drag-and-drop graphical development tools that hide all that XML code and provide reusable code for many common VoiceXML interactions. Many of these tools take advantage of the open source Eclipse development environment, which is familiar to most Web developers. There are several open source IVR efforts as well.

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Tags unified communicationsvoice portals

More about ACTAvayaCiscoDatamonitorEclipseGenesysInteractive SolutionsIntervoiceNICENortelNuanceParadigmPromiseSpeechWorksSymbolT-MobileT-MobileTravelocityVoxeoW3C

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