Johannesburg, 08 Sep 2006
Avaya Sub-Saharan Africa has announced the immediate local availability of Avaya Voice Portal, a platform that combines Web services and IP telephony (IPT) to deliver speech and touch-tone self-service solutions more quickly and with greater flexibility than ever.
Andre Deetlefs, Senior Solutions Architect at Avaya, says: "Avaya Voice Portal enables companies to use the power of speech to expand reach, increase user productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction. Its open architecture and open standards-based design makes for exceptional ease of integration, expandability and longevity."
Deetlefs adds that the cost of delivering services such as routine call centre enquires and online services such as balance enquiries, order status and stock availability is decreased, and the range of services that can be offered is increased.
"Touch-tone only services are limited: you can do much more when you can perform name and address recognition, secure voice identification, or recognition of alphanumeric symbols such as flight numbers and share symbols, for example."
Voice Portal runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms and is based on IP telephony and standards including VoiceXML, J2EE, Web Services and Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP). Touch-tone and speech application development is based on the open source Eclipse development environment. Centralised application management tools, Web-based access and SNMP support round out the features that combine to drastically lower costs while offering high availability.
There are three primary software components in Voice Portal: Media Processing Platform (MPP), System Management and Design Environment, and Voice Portal Management System. The MPP acts as a Voice XML browser which executes Web-based applications. It also supports standard MRCP interfaces to text-to-speech and voice recognition and verification systems. It integrates with Avaya IP Telephony and Avaya Communication Manager, and interfaces to Avaya Contact Centre infrastructure.
Applications can be written in a number of ways: hand-coding of VoiceXML and ECMA scripts; using a development environment such as IVR Designer or IBM WebSphere Speech Application Designer; or an environment to generate dynamic VoiceXML. Avaya Dialog Designer, available separately, is a complete development "drag and drop" environment allowing faster development from concept to tested deployment.
The Voice Portal Management System (VPMS) provides a Web-based interface for all management functions and plays a key role in bridging the communication infrastructure and the IT environment. VPMS handles automatic failover and licence reassignment and registration. A comprehensive set of call detail, session detail and application records is collected and presented via pre-built Web-based reports.
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