Speech on a Network

"Companies have been slow to adopt an SOA because it’s harder to dowith multiple vendors than it is in a traditional, one-vendor stand-alone application stack," Koloski adds.

Modest Beginnings
It is widely agreed that it is best to start modestly with a handful of applications that can have other applications built around them or be easily expanded to accommodate new uses. 

In the speech arena, VoIP and unified communications (UC) applications are good starting points because their central goal is to merge voice, data, and multimedia solutions onto a single platform that is typically network- or Internet-based. These applications also easily interface with other central business systems, like Microsoft Office or Salesforce.com, to add components like calendaring, contact lists, and address books to traditional phone, messaging, conferencing, and telepresence applications.

That is something to which John Burke, vice president of technology for the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston, can attest. In launching the hotel’s Seaportal—a Web-based system that delivers information, entertainment, Web and email access, direct dialing forf eatured guest services, and complimentary VoIP calls straight to hotel guests in their rooms—he simply created a few Web-based XML interfaces to expand existing voice and data services in the hotel and was able to get the system up and running in about 60 days. It went live in December 2006.

SessionSuite SOA Edition from BlueNote Networks served as the backbone for the project. It allowed Burke to integrate IP telephony with existing Web services and business applications without having tor eplace existing hardware or software. A Web interface to the property management system even leverages guest information to personalize both content and services.

Without the ability to repurpose existing systems, the project likely would  have been four times more expensive, Burke estimates.

The hotel even got to keep its existing phone system. "We were really interested in leveraging our previous investments in voice technologies. We weren’t ready to get rid of our existing PBX phone switches yet," Burke says.

Eventually Burke plans to replace the hotel’s legacy phone system witha full IP network, and having an SOA will smooth the transition, he says.

VoIP and UC are not the only communications and voice-based technologies that are feeding off a growing convergence of the Web and telecommunications worlds. An increasing demand from consumers forWeb-style applications on their mobile phones and other devices has also steered more traditional interactive voice response (IVR) and other call center technologies down the same SOA path.

An example cited by Rehor is an airline outbound calling application that alerts travelers when their planes will be delayed. A Web service could initiate the call, based on passenger information stored in the passenger registry. A speech synthesis engine or collection of prerecorded audio files could be used to create the message. Using three simple pieces of information—the flight number, the delay, and the new departure time—the application can inform anyone booked on the flight that Clampett Airlines flight 676 is delayed. The new departure time is 11:21 a.m.

The same application might also provide a few options: To stand by for a different flight, press 1. To be connected with a service representative, press 2.  

"A VoiceXML developer could build the application and provide a Web services interface for the Web developer to use. Furthermore, the Web service could be used by any other application that needs to make an outbound call, without the Web developer having to be concerned witht he telephony or speech technology aspects of the project," Rehor explains.

For businesses today, this represents a dramatic paradigm shift. "Historically, speech and the IVR have been siloed from the rest of the business, but as companies are seeing them as more of an IT function, the same management principles are being applied," Gartner’s Cramoysan notes.

VoiceXML’s Growing Role
Also closely linked to the SOA trend is the growing use in the call center of standards-based development processes and protocols spawned from the IT and Web services domains rather than the traditional telecom world. The de facto standard has become VoiceXML, a programming language for creating machine-based dialogues that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and touch-tone inputs, and telephone access to Web content.