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I am absolutely convinced that communications ASPs are going to be the
biggest thing to ever happen to telephony. ASPs change the entire way
companies develop and deploy applications. I have been waxing poetic about
this group of ASPs for almost a year; and now more than ever, I am convinced
we're going to see incredible growth in this area of communications.
VoiceXML Growth
One area to pay particular attention to is the VoiceXML market, which I
would describe as open, programmable interactive voice response (IVR) with
built-in speech recognition. This area is going to witness explosive growth
for a number of reasons. First of all, corporations that use proprietary IVR
systems are now able to leverage the great number of VoiceXML/XML developers
available worldwide. The Internet has spawned these XML developers in record
numbers. VoiceXML speech recognition allows anyone to develop reusable
grammars that can be leveraged by multiple applications. This ability to
reuse code written by others makes this language even more powerful.
The End User Pull
Ok, so we now know that VoiceXML is an open language allowing anyone with a
Web browser to develop and share code. Why will anyone need new voice apps
in a Web-enabled world? We all know that the Web has spoiled us, allowing
anyone immediate and unlimited access to volumes of information on just
about any topic. As we become busier and busier however, our need to
retrieve information persists, even when we don't have access to a GUI-based
computer system. VoiceXML applications such as voice portals allow users
access to a great wealth of information using any telephone. Finally, there
is a way to make much of the data found on the Internet available to
telephone users. The need for these systems becomes even greater as cell
phone minutes become less expensive and cell phones become more portable and
ubiquitous. Finally, I have to say that there are many times I find it
easier to access simple information like the day's weather by phone rather
than PC.
The Corporate Push
Corporations also have a major incentive to add VoiceXML applications to
their arsenals in order to provide another vital channel of service to their
potential and current customers. Web content can easily be repurposed for
the phone through effectively written VoiceXML programs. In many cases, this
allows an entirely new audience access to content that was once only
available online.
Customer Service Initiatives
It was predicted that the Internet would quickly kill telephone sales but in
reality, the Web has dramatically increased the demand for telephone sales
and support. In the January issue of CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions, a
sister publication to Communications ASP, I recently coined Tehrani's Law
of Customer Service, which addresses this issue and states, "In the
Internet era, it takes 100 times more money to attract a new customer than
it does to keep an old one." But how do you provide excellent service
when it is tough to find good people at a reasonable salary level?
Effectively written VoiceXML programs allow corporations to reduce the
amount of people staffing their tech support, inside sales, and customer
service departments, making these departments more productive and more
efficient. Not only does this boost the bottom line, it simultaneously
improves service and support levels.
Saving Time
In my opinion, the best part of speech recognition-enabled VoiceXML apps is
that customers are able to interrupt the prompts generated by the automated
attendant. For example, if you call Amtrak to reserve a train, and the
prompt takes 60 seconds to complete, you may interrupt at any time and say,
"Give me two round-trip tickets from New York to Atlanta." This of
course saves time and increases efficiency.
TELLME
I recently visited with representatives of Tellme (www.tellme.com),
a CASP that allows you to develop and run VoiceXML apps on their server for
free. Once written, finished applications can be paid for by consumers via
per-minute fees. Their development environment is Web based, and they ran me
through a few demos such as the standard "Hello World"
demonstration that took only a few lines of code to implement.
I decided to go for it and write my own VoiceXML program. I've had a
great deal of prior coding experience centered on database languages, Basic,
and C, but none of my development ever involved the Web. I wanted to see how
easy it would be for a relative beginner like myself to get started with
VoiceXML.
At first I looked at the varied and well-documented sample programs
provided at studio.tellme.com. The
applications provide enough samples to allow you to easily adapt them and
build a very powerful application. I wondered how quickly I could adapt the
logic of a few sample programs in order to write a truly useful application
for the parent company of this publication, TMC? My intention was to present
you with a useful sample program that is easy to follow and powerful in
function. For those of you who are beginners, I hope this application helps
you get your feet wet in the voice development market and for those
experienced programmers out there, any suggestions are always appreciated.
The application I developed works as follows. At our upcoming trade show
Communications Solutions EXPO, we have various conference tracks devoted to
constituents like service providers, enterprise conferees, and government
users. Within each track we cover the absolute hottest topics in telecom.
For example, we have a unique Communications ASP track for every category of
attendee so that we may address your individual needs perfectly (see our
Communications Solutions EXPO Spring 2001 preview for more
information). I decided to write an app that lets you say your type of
company, at which point you will be told the name of the specific session
that makes the most sense for you.
The full program can be seen in Figure 1. You may also wish to examine
this code on the Web by going to expo.tmcnet.com/rtehrani/csexpo.xml
[link will open in a new window]. Regardless
of whether you are a programmer or not, the goal of this article is to
familiarize you with how easy it is to develop powerful and useful VoiceXML
applications.
A GUIDE TO THE CODE
With this background let's delve right into the program in Figure 1 and see
what makes it tick. You'll notice that letter A points to a variable named
initial_greeting that I define as equal to one. You'll notice that letter D
references an If/Then statement that only plays the long greeting when
initial_greeting is equal to one. Once played, letter E shows that
initial_greeting is then set to zero and in the future, this If/Then
statement will always play the shorter greeting shown in letter .
Letter B defines the grammar of this program, allowing it to ascertain
what company type the caller is asking about. If the caller says the words
"enterprise," "corporate," etc., the value of
"one" will be returned. The DTMF code assigns numerals one through
seven to each type of company, for access by voice or through the phone
keypad. This value will be used in section J. The next line gets a bit more
intricate. When two words are put in parentheses, they must both be said to
be recognized. If one of the words is preceded by a question mark, then zero
or more occurrences of that word may be uttered to be recognized, as well as
the other word or words in parentheses. Please look closely at the third
line in this section. If a caller says the phrase "call center,"
the word "call" will be recognized and then the word center will
be recognized in the expression (?contact center). The caller could just as
easily say "customer center," "marketing center," or any
word followed by center and still be recognized as contact center.
I think it is important to point out the block-like nature of this
language exemplified by letter C, where <prompt> begins the block, and
letter G, where </prompt> ends the block. Continuing right along, the
next block named <nomatch> is executed if a word or phrase is not
understood. You can see in this block that users are told that they were not
understood, at which point they are played the shorter introductory prompt.
Reprompt is responsible for directing the program back up to the prompt
portion of the program.
Letter H refers us to the area of the program that is executed when an
utterance is recognized, and I refers to a result of "one," in
which case letter J actually uses text-to-speech technology to utter the
phrase "The most suitable enterprise course is titled Kicking Your
Business Communications Into the Network Cloud" located in the
<audio> block.
I invite you to try this application for yourself by dialing
877-933-8355, as it will give you an incredible taste of just how powerful a
simple VoiceXML application can be. Using an environment like Tellme's or a
competitor's like Voxeo (www.voxeo.com) allows anyone with Web access to
develop and deliver sophisticated VoiceXML applications with no hardware
investment at all. It should be noted that just about any Web content can be
accessed and read using VoiceXML, allowing the development of an infinitely
large number of useful applications.
This language is so simple to learn and the library of reusable code
objects is growing so quickly that anyone can start a business based on
these simple Web-based development environments. Here is a great application
that I wish someone would write so I could access it as I drive home from
work. Allow me to select a restaurant and then allow me to select the type
of food I am in the mood for, and read me the menu choices available that
contain chicken, fish, or whatever else I request. When I am ready to
choose, allow me to order my food, at which point my order should be faxed
or e-mailed to the restaurant and delivered to my house soon after I arrive,
or made available for pickup. I think busy people would pay a small monthly
fee for this service, and I am sure restaurants would be interested in
increasing their business and thus participating in this program (maybe even
paying a fee per order). And of course the national pizza delivery companies
should trip over themselves for a chance to sponsor each call-in.
The opportunity is phenomenal for a reseller to use these tools in order
to sell finished applications to corporate customers or even service
providers. Best of all, these tools allow anyone with access to a phone and
a browser to develop applications that can generate revenue. Now anyone can
start a communications business with absolutely no equipment investment. If
you have some powerful applications you've developed in VoiceXML and want to
share your ideas with our readers, please send them to rtehrani@tmcnet.com.
[ Return
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