July 1999

• Nokia IP Mobility
• ObjectSwitch 3 Network-Resident Server
• SpeechWorks 5.0

Nokia IP Mobility
Nokia
6000 Connection Drive
Irving, TX 75039
Ph: 972-894-5000
Fx: 972-894-5050
Web: www.nokia.com

When was the last time you were at an airport and you didn’t see a business traveler typing away on a laptop, or checking voice mail from a mobile telephone? The success of these mobile devices, along with that of the Internet, has created an urgent need for people to stay connected anytime, anywhere.

But what happens when you can’t access the information you need? Not all airports are equipped with terminals that allow you to dial up so that you can check your e-mail or log on to your corporate network. Not only can this be frustrating, it can also mean a loss of productivity for someone whose flight was delayed and who has several hours to spare while waiting in the airport.

Nokia has unveiled the components of its global IP Mobility vision, which is designed to support the existing infrastructure of a corporate network, and extend it to your own needs. Nokia’s IP Mobility strategy takes two parallel complementary paths toward the wireless information society; one originates in cellular communications, the other in traditional data networking. The first path started from wide area voice communications and is now evolving through narrowband data services toward wideband packet data services. The second path starts from a fixed Internet Protocol (IP) network, and is now evolving toward delivering voice, security, virtual private networks, and broadband wireless hotspot services.

Together, these new IP solutions provide mobile professionals with broadband wireless access to e-mail, corporate information, and the Internet, all of which are essential services for professionals on the go. The solution wirelessly extends the corporate LAN to common areas such as meeting rooms, and enables in-building public wireless hotspots, such as airports, hotels, and convention centers, providing wireless portable computer activity. The Nokia Wireless LAN portfolio combines mobility with high data rates. It includes the Nokia Wireless LAN Access Point, Nokia Wireless LAN PC card, and software and utilities to make installation, use, and management a seamless extension to a wired network.

“This represents a significant step toward enabling the data communications market to move toward a wireless information society,” said Pekka Lundmark, senior vice president of Nokia Wireless Business Communications. “Enabling the mobility of IP services via secure, broadband, wireless connectivity will change the traditional data networking playing field, similar to the way cellular has changed the wide area communications market.”

A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a new way to extend the reach of LANs. Instead of plugging into a LAN wall outlet, you connect wirelessly to a LAN Access Point. All you need is a WLAN PC card for the user and a WLAN Access Point to the LAN.

The Nokia C020/C021 Wireless LAN Card is based on the IEEE 802.11 industry standards and can be used in laptop computers, high-end PDAs, or other devices with a PC Card (PCMCIA) slot, running the Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 operating systems.

The Wireless LAN Card provides initially 2 Mbps wireless connections and requires no further actions from the user after the card is installed. This means that the user has truly wireless laptop access to the LAN and Internet — no more cables or searching for LAN outlets.

The Nokia A020 WLAN Access Point  is also based on the IEEE 802.11 industry standard, and provides initially up to 2 Mbps wireless connections. It can be upgraded to the IEEE 802.11 High Rate versions, as they become available. The WLAN Access Point acts as a branch office access router providing on-demand access to the Internet and the corporate network so that up to 30 mobile users (depending on the level of network access) may share a single Internet Service Provider account.

The Nokia A020 WLAN Access Point has been designed with simplicity in mind. After all, since there aren’t any cables or extraneous pieces of hardware to contend with, why complicate things? Full Web-based management is provided, including a set-up wizard. All configuration and monitoring can be implemented using a Web browser for ease-of-use. SNMP is also supported, ensuring seamless integration into corporate network management platforms.

IP Mobility is easy to install and administer, and moreover, is secure and highly scalable. This makes it ideally suited to meet increasing connectivity demands. It is a highly interoperable solution that cost effectively extends the reach of the LAN, and gives mobile professionals the freedom to access the information they need.

ObjectSwitch 3 Network-Resident Server
ObjectSwitch
900 Larkspur Landing
Suite 270
Larkspur, CA 94939
P: 415-925-3471
F: 415-925-3499
Web: www.objectswitch.com

As a developer of applications, one of the least productive exercises you can take part in is redoing work that someone else has already done satisfactorily. Unless you’re adding some significant new features or addressing previously unaddressed issues (security, compatibility, etc.), there’s no point in reinventing the wheel.

Instead, you should be free to focus on your core application, while making use of the work that someone else has already done where possible. This is especially true when you are developing an application that requires integration of a variety of elements: information stores, transport mechanisms, etc. There’s no need to write a protocol that allows your application to access databases if you can use ODBC or LDAP and be done with it. Not only does the use of existing work (in this case, the LDAP or ODBC standards) save you time, it also broadens the scope of your application. Your app might never require such scope, but then again, the well-defined standard might prove surprisingly useful in allowing for scalability and compatibility in the future.

And while ObjectSwitch’s Network-Resident Server is not a standard protocol, per se, in many ways it functions as one. Network-Resident Server allows for the integration of various infrastructure components: the PSTN and carrier switches, the Internet and Web applications, intra/extranets, databases, and so on. In other words, ObjectSwitch’s Network-Resident Server provides a single environment that allows a developer to develop an application and a service provider to deploy it without concerning themselves with specific details of the system infrastructure.

Such flexibility and portability is crucial in this world of 24x7 sales, service, and support. E-commerce, for example, promises to do away with “banker’s hours,” and even “mall hours.” Imagine if you went to amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com at 3:00 in the morning to buy a book and discovered that they were “closed until 8:00 a.m.” You’d be shocked, and you might not have time to log on and buy that book at 8:00 in the morning. If you’re an impulse buyer, you might not even want the book anymore at 8:00 a.m. Now, this raises some issues of consumerism and economics that are beyond the scope of this piece, but as a developer, your application should not place limits on the sales, service, or support options of your customers.

If a big online business needs to handle 100,000 transactions per hour, Monday through Friday, with bursts of up to 200,000 transactions per hour in the weekday “prime time” hours, you should be able to accommodate their needs. Otherwise, they will look elsewhere. And with ObjectSwitch’s Network-Resident Server in place, you can focus on meeting their needs, rather than on integrating their back office applications with their TCP/IP network and then with the Internet at large.

Oh, and by the way, Network-Resident Server has another neat feature: software fault tolerance. What is software fault tolerance? Software fault tolerance means that the transaction is supported and maintained, even if a particular component in the path fails.

Have you ever eaten at a restaurant and had the momentarily disconcerting experience of seeing your waiter take off his/her apron and walk out the door? For a moment you think: Wait…? But then you look at your watch and see that it’s 9:00 on the nose. You barely have time to realize that your waiter’s shift just ended before you hear a voice say, “Are you done with that? Would you like dessert?” A new waiter has taken the old one’s place, and you calmly order the double mudpie brownie with chocolate sauce. That is what software fault tolerance is all about. Your server changed, the transport mechanism of the product (your dinner) changed, yet the service continued seamlessly.

Of course, there’s always the alternate experience: the one where your waiter leaves and minutes go by — 5, 10, 15… — until you finally have to get up and ask for your check, wondering if perhaps you could just walk out without paying, just to teach them a lesson.

Now, if you’re an e-commerce business handing multiple transactions simultaneously, which type of service do you want on your site? The first, of course. Where the customer transaction is maintained and tracked from start to finish. This is what ObjectSwitch does: the customer is served in a consistent and appropriate manner, and the customer is billed in a consistent and appropriate manner. Even if there are problems in the network, or if the connection is lost, or if the database crashes — the transaction is maintained, and no one is left wondering whether the product will arrive or if the customer was billed.

This SW fault tolerance is achieved through a process called “atomic transactions,” which means that all processing steps are performed as transactions. If a transaction aborts for some reason, the data is restored to the “last known good” state. Additionally, since ObjectSwitch handles the interactions between the various applications and information stores, there is no single point of failure. Instead, ObjectSwitch allows reliable queuing, preserving transactions until an unavailable component becomes available again, and then completing the stored transactions.

ObjectSwitch 3 Network-Resident Server runs on standard hardware and supports SPARC Solaris, HP-UX, and Windows NT on Intel platforms. It features a Java-based development GUI, and a variety of core adapters and interfaces are available for: Oracle, Sybase, Informix, CORBA, SNMP, TCAP/SS7, C++, and Java clients. \In developing e-commerce and other network applications, as in the finest restaurants, the best customer experience includes service that is timely, accurate, and unobtrusive. Developing applications on ObjectSwitch’s Network-Resident Server leaves customers with just one thing to say: “Check, please.”

SpeechWorks 5.0
SpeechWorks International, Ltd.
695 Atlantic Avenue
Boston, MA 02111
Ph: 617-428-4444
Fx: 617-428-1122
Web: www.speechworks.com

Turn on the radio, or listen to the evening news and you’re likely to hear something about e-commerce. It’s an easy way to purchase goods, make transactions, and even pay your bills. While e-commerce is often equated with Web-based transactions, the telephone is the original, easy, ubiquitous way to conduct business and exchange information.

Before people started logging on to shopping sites and conducting Net banking, they picked up the phone to order from a catalog, or to check their savings account balance. People are used to punching PIN numbers into their keypad to access their personal information over the phone, but what about enhanced security measures?

E-commerce Web sites have secure servers, and people often have several passwords in order to access their accounts. But, as e-commerce transactions become more commonplace over the telephone with automated speech recognition (ASR) systems, it is important to provide security in some applications to ensure privacy and fraud protection.

SpeechWorks 5.0, from SpeechWorks International, offers customers a new series of advanced features that deliver unprecedented recognition accuracy. Now, with SpeechWorks 5.0, companies can quickly design, test, refine, and deploy secure ASR applications for automated transactions such as buying travel tickets, selling mutual funds, requesting health care referrals, updated record accounts, and many other transactions which complement e-commerce sites.

SpeechWorks SMARTRecognizer, featured in SpeechWorks 5.0, improves accuracy and transaction completion through a self-learning, continuous feedback loop. The Self-Modifying Automatic Recognition Tuning (SMART) engine cuts error rates by 30–60 percent in deploying systems by automatically discerning accents and pronunciations (e.g., “root” or “rout” for route), and instantly modifying these variations for the application. Additionally, the SMARTRecognizer reduces “out-of-the-box” error rates by 37 percent, compared to SpeechWorks 4.0.

SpeechWorks 5.0 delivers five new DialogModules geared for smooth e-commerce transactions: Credit Card Numbers, Credit Card Expiration Dates, Natural Numbers, Time, and Social Security Numbers. DialogModules are pre-fabricated “building blocks” for common speech interactions, with icon-based, drag-and-drop capabilities that make it easy to develop systems with interactive voice response (IVR) toolkits.

Through the integration of SpeechWorks 5.0 with technology from E-Speech, SpeechWorks 5.0 delivers advanced recognition of the widest variety of names and street addresses. For example, the ASR system will have no trouble understanding “Aurelio Woolstenhulme,” “71109 Tamarack Court,” or a range of other names and addresses that can be pronounced many different ways. This capability automates many e-commerce transactions that rely on name and address recognition, such as mail order, name and address changes, help desk services (including fax back), and auto-attendants.

Speaker verification technology from ITT Industries’ SpeakerKey and Lucent Technologies relies on the distinctive characteristics of people’s voices (voiceprints) to verify a caller’s identity instead of, or in tandem with, PINs or passwords that callers must memorize. With SpeechWorks 5.0, companies can include best-in-breed speaker verification capabilities into their speech applications to ensure that callers conduct secure transactions simply by registering a voiceprint during the initial call. In subsequent calls, a prompt will verify the caller’s voiceprint in just seconds.

Graphical Tuning Tools make it easier than ever for developers to refine the ASR application and improve performance. Developers using Graphics Tuning Tools can monitor and analyze calls, so they can quickly understand if and why callers are having difficulty with a prompt like, “Please say your 10-digit account number.” The developer can make a quick change such as adding the prompt, “It can be found in the upper right-hand corner of your statement.”

SpeechWorks 5.0 runs on Dialogic hardware and software, the Mazzar platform, and with netVest, digiTRADE, and Intellisystems services. SpeechWorks 5.0 also supports multiple server platforms, based on UNIX, OS2, and Windows NT. n�
Figure 1. SpeechWorks 5.0 helps automate the creation and tuning of secure ASR applications.