Avaya Upgrades Self-Service Platform

Avaya has made a significant upgrade in three self-service offerings that it introduced at the beginning of last year.

Introduced at SpeechTEK 2007 in New York City, the three products are Avaya Voice Portal 4.0, its flagship self-service software; Interactive Response 3.0, a self-service platform; and Avaya Dialog Designer 4.0, a tool for developing next-generation speech self-service applications.

Changes to the products focus on their adherence to Web services and industry standards, including full compliance with call control extensible markup language (CCXML) and VoiceXML.

The voice portal and the IVR application provide complementary functionality, while the dialog designer allows users to tie these pieces together, Michael Perry, director, voice self-service solutions, told CRM Buyer. "Wherever a company is on the voice continuum, there is a product or feature to help it."

Voice Portal

Now fully compliant with industry standards, Voice Portal allows users to speech-enable most business processes, Perry said. Chief among these is Web services-based outbound calling. Typical examples include law firms and hospitals, which could use the tool to integrate speech into an existing appointment scheduling application.

Avaya has increased by a factor of four the amount of simultaneous self-service transactions that Voice Portal can support per system. The application also directly integrates to SIP (session initiation protocol) trunk lines to provide a foundation for a SIP presence in multimedia applications, such as video-based self-service.

Avaya Voice Portal has also been enhanced to work with Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) -- processes that automate the human collaboration required to conduct business. Such integration, for instance, could notify purchasing agents when supplies run low and ask them to answer automated questions or indicate their status using speech.

Legs on a Stool

The other two applications -- Interactive Response and Dialog Designer -- have been similarly enhanced with Web services, Perry said. Interactive Response now fully supports VoiceXML, the standard to develop speech self-service applications. One byproduct is that capabilities developed in this platform are easily ported to the Voice Portal when a company is ready to migrate to IP telephony.

Avaya Dialog Designer 4.0 is an Eclipse-based application tool that allows developers to build speech self-service in both traditional telephony and Web services environments. Dialog Designer now supports CCXML and has added support for interacting with SIP signaling, the latest Nuance 9.0 speech technologies, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) speech technologies.

Advanced scaling and failover features enhance computer telephony integration and contact center capabilities.