Provider of hosted and managed automated customer contact solutions West Interactive, has announced that its Holly Voice Platform 5.1 has passed the VoiceXML Forum Platform Certification Program.
With the passing of this program, the product has joined an elite group of companies having their voice platforms and speech technologies declared VoiceXML (News - Alert) 2.1 compliant by the VoiceXML Forum.
“Our customers can rest assured knowing that our technologies have been pre-tested against the highest VoiceXML industry standard,” said Rob Kassel, vice president for platform product development at West Interactive (News - Alert).
Kassel said that by taking the platform and components via this rigorous certification process, “we’re enhancing automated voice solutions that deliver customer care and caller satisfaction, as well as drive operating efficiencies and accelerated deployments.”
The VoiceXML Forum’s 2.1 Platform Certification Program comprises of a conformance test suite. In addition to VoiceXML 2.0, Speech Recognition Grammar Standard (SRGS) 1.0, VoiceXML 2.1, the suite covers a subset of Speech Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) 1.0.
“Certification provides a new level of vendor differentiation on the VoiceXML platform level,” said Daniel Hong, lead analyst of customer interaction at Ovum, adding that it is no longer a question of VoiceXML or traditional IVR.
Hong noted that two years have passed since the market has witnessed the inflection point where VoiceXML licenses eclipsed that of proprietary IVR systems.
“As we roll out the tape over the next couple of years, enterprises need to evaluate platform interoperability and monitoring and analytics capabilities, in addition to performance, to choose an IVR platform that effectively meets changing business needs, while protecting investments,” Hong said.
Last year in July, West Interactive announced acquisition of TuVox (News - Alert) , a provider of on-demand speech and IVR solutions.
Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Juliana Kenny