The why and how of voice portals

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

Implementing voice interfaces and recognition can be tricky

The one area that does require specialized expertise is the interface for touch-tone interactions and speech recognition, known collectively as the voice user interface. Voice UIs follow a different paradigm from Web page interactions and so require specialized training. However, a team of voice portal developers probably needs only one or two voice UI experts; your telecom group may already have such specialists, and voice portal vendors are happy to do the consulting work for you. Once the voice UI is designed and perfected, the IVR project can be completed by typical Web developers.

Implementing speech recognition is particularly difficult. "The skills around developing speech applications are pretty stringent, says Brian Bischoff, global vice president of subscriber solutions at Genesys, a Web conferencing vendor. "A speech application can perform pretty poorly if you don't know what you're doing." Speech recognition vendors include Nuance, Tuvox, and Voxify.

If you implement speech recognition, do note that your enablement fees per port will rise significantly. It typically costs US$1,000 to $2,000 per port to enable a voice portal. With speech recognition, that expense climbs to US1,800 to $3,600 per port, says Bischoff.

Many larger companies have multiple IVR systems in place. If so, it makes sense to look for tools that can create a common voice UI over several different voice portal systems. Telecom provider T-Mobile International faced that challenge, ultimately using Voxeo's tools to develop a single voice UI across its mishmash of voice portals spread across many European countries, the result of several acquisitions. "We can also make a single change across them all, rather than having to make separate changes to each of them," says Jan Safka, T-Mobile's senior head of voice and mobile services.

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Tags unified communicationsvoice portals

More about ACTAvayaCiscoDatamonitorEclipseGenesysInteractive SolutionsIntervoiceNICENortelNuanceParadigmPromiseSpeechWorksSymbolT-MobileT-MobileTravelocityVoxeoW3C

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