August 2000

New Products For Voice, Recording And E-Commerce

• Brightware 2000: E-Commerce Interaction Management
• Nuance Delivers V-Builder 1.0 And Launches Voice Staging Center On The Web
• MARATHON Recording Suite From ASC

Multimedia communications. Growing volumes of e-mail. Click-and-run browsers who could have been satisfied customers. With these types of concerns daily impacting the conduct of e-business, it may be forgotten that the original goal was generating a bottom line in black ink. The challenge is not simply to provide more channels of communications, but to effectively control and manage online communications that both attract and retain customers.

Brightware, Inc. recently launched Brightware 2000, described by the company as a more intelligent approach for helping both Web site visitors and online businesses establish and maintain effective relationships on the Web. The Brightware 2000 suite unifies Brightware's Web Assistance, Email Assistance and Live Assistance products. It incorporates an intelligent self-service hub with a fully integrated, multichannel contact center, designed to support e-commerce interactions across all online touchpoints. Brightware's automation technology is designed to provide accurate and consistent responses to e-customer inquiries by leveraging intelligence gathered from customer profile information, the nature of the inquiry and customizable business rules to provide cost-effective interactions. The intent is to balance the needs of customers against the costs of serving them through each online channel.

Coinciding with the release of Brightware 2000, the company unveiled two new products, Brightware Concierge and Brightware Converse. Concierge is a Web-based customer assistance hub designed to guide customers to information or resources on a Web site or escalate an inquiry through the most appropriate and cost-effective channel. It integrates to a Web site through a simple "Ask A Question" button. Among its capabilities, Concierge displays existing Web site content that is relevant to an inquiry; can dynamically compose Web pages to answer common questions and integrate information from third-party applications; engage in automated dialogs that can recommend an appropriate product or solution for the customer; and escalate the inquiry to the contact center and select the online service channel based on the company's business rules.

Brightware Converse, an integrated live chat product, works in conjunction with Brightware's Web and Email Assistance products to provide a unified desktop for customer service representatives. The product is designed to furnish robust routing and blended queuing functions for managing e-mail and live chat interactions while leveraging the same resources. It contains pre-composed responses routed to agents as well as automated responses for routine questions that are sent to the customer. Converse also features a shared knowledge base and customer interaction database, common business rules, a supervisor desktop and several reports.
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In May of this year, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) acknowledged the submission of the VoiceXML specification. Its future adoption by the W3C should accelerate and expand the reach of the Internet through voice-enabled Web content and services. VoiceXML was created by the VoiceXML Forum and is supported by more than 150 companies, including AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Motorola and Nuance.

Nuance Communications announced the availability of V-Builder 1.0, a software development tool for building VoiceXML-based speech recognition applications that can be accessed over the telephone. With its intuitive, graphical, drag-and-drop development environment, V-Builder is designed for professional Web and speech developers to create high-quality voice Web sites. Using V-Builder, developers can combine the simplicity of VoiceXML with SpeechObjects (Nuance's open, reusable speech components) to create complete speech applications that can access databases and Internet content. V-Builder enables developers to drag and drop VoiceXML objects and SpeechObjects into an application and customize them without writing code. A graphical grammar editor and prompt management system are included to simplify the definition of valid input into speech applications and the prompts that are played to callers. The resulting voice sites can use Nuance's speech recognition and voice authentication software to enable telephone access to a broad range of applications. V-Builder will be available at no cost through the Nuance Development Network (NDN) at www.nuance.com, along with the speech recognition software to develop and test applications on the desktop. V-Builder runs on Windows NT and can be integrated or bundled with third-party tools such as interactive voice response (IVR) tools and Web development tools.

Nuance also announced the Voice Site Staging Center, a 24-by-7 interactive testing center that aids developers by allowing them to test their voice Web applications over the phone using the Nuance Voyager voice browser. The center is intended to expedite time to market by providing the necessary deployment infrastructure for testing, allowing developers to focus their efforts on application development, and reducing the cost of development equipment. The Voice Site Staging Center is a free service to members of the Nuance Developer Network (NDN) and will be hosted by Interactive Telesis through a partnership with Nuance.
No. 526, www.ccsmag.com/freeinfo 

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An integral part of any call center is its recording system: it is used for training agents, ensuring quality across a campaign, legal compliance and more. ASC, which has been producing recording and communications devices for more than 35 years, has released its MARATHON product suite, which is designed to fill the recording needs of a wide spectrum of industries.

MARATHON systems provide an expanded hard disc drive for extended record and replay capability and the system may be equipped with DVD, MOD or DAT (DDS 1, 2, 3 and 4) archive drives to provide thousands of hours of storage capacity. They are also designed to be integrated into almost every user network supporting TCP/IP, allowing thousands of networked channels to be accessed via LAN/WAN.

All MARATHON systems can be operated locally using a mouse and keyboard or remotely from a networked PC Workstation. Each recorder can accommodate various channel configurations with the ability to network multiple units in any combination with other recorders within the MARATHON suite. Additionally, an API is available to allow you to integrate playback into an existing application.

Transactions, inquiries and other important activities can be accessed quickly by capturing the customer number, account number, calling party ID and/or user ID and integrating it with the audio. Call information from the ACD, PBX or IVR can be obtained via the CTI link or the customer database. This information is then stored in the database of the MARATHON as well as the CTI server providing additional search criteria.

The architecture of the MARATHON is fully compatible with digital (E1, T1, PCM, ISDN) and analog communication systems, most turret systems, PBXs, LANs and ACDs. This integration allows for the capture of the call-related data pertinent to the recorded voice.

ASC provides three versions of the MARATHON. MARATHON PRO was designed to handle high volume professional environments that require a reliable and secure system. An easy-to-use interface with integrated track-ball mouse is available on the front panel of the PRO to allow for local control and redundancy in high volume applications. Each recorder can support from 8 to 128 channels with the ability to network thousands of channels.

MARATHON ADVANCED can be installed in a 19" rack or as desktop unit. This system can be operated locally using a mouse and keyboard or remotely from a PC Workstation. The scaleable design can accommodate from 8 to 64 channels with the ability to network multiple units within the MARATHON family of recorders, to support thousands of channels.

MARATHON COMPACT is housed in a PC tower. The system can be operated locally using a mouse and keyboard, or remotely from a networked PC Workstation. Each recorder can accommodate 4 to 32 channel configurations with the ability to network multiple units in any combination with other recorders from the MARATHON suite.
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