Glorsoft Limited, a young up and coming Irish Software company today announced that its Voice Application Development middleware, Velocity v3.0, was selected for the Best Development Tool award at the Internet Telephony EXPO exhibition and conference at the Miami Beach

GlorSoft - Velocity 3.0 .NET IVR Dev Tool

ITEXPO, produced by Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), is the world’s largest and best-attended IP Communications trade show, drawing an average attendance of 7,000 buyers and sellers of IP Communications products and services.

Glorsoft, an Enterprise Ireland supported High Potential Startup (HPSU), is a Dublin based developer of interactive voice response (IVR) and speech-based application programming tools. The company has been actively building a global developer community with its Velocity software development kit (SDK) and travelled to Miami last week to exhibit at the ITEXPO.

“This week in Miami we’ve set new standards across the board – from our conference content, to the quality of the products and solutions on our expo floor, and this year’s Best-of-Show winners deserve recognition for differentiating themselves from a large and highly competitive field,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO and conference chairman for TMC. “We’re pleased to honor the “best-of-show” winners, and we thank them for sharing their innovative solutions with the communications and technology community at ITEXPO.”

Commenting on the award, Tim Farrelly, Managing Director of Glorsoft, stated “we are delighted that our Velocity product has been recognised on the international stage. We always believed we had a World class product and the feedback from the attendees at the show has been excellent. We look forward to building our partner and developer community and would like to thank our existing users who have contributed to our success to-date.”

Velocity v3.0 is used by application developers to build automated voice and speech based solutions. It is an open, standards-based platform which integrates tightly with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 and numerous MRCP based Speech Recognition engines. As a .NET based technology, Velocity makes telephony programming more accessible to the global developer community. Velocity based solutions are presently deployed in Ireland, UK, USA, Canada and New Zealand with many more projects in the pipeline.

The Velocity SDK can be downloaded for free at www.glorsoft.com

Further Information -:

Anne Marie Moran, Glorsoft Limited
3300 Lake Drive, Citywest Business Campus, Dublin 24
Telephone 01-6877000
Annemarie@glorsoft.com

IVR system is not just a clubbing together of state of the art CTI boards, high end servers, very easy to drag and drop tool design IVR call flow for flexibility. One of the saddest part about IVR development is, the users may not appreciate about these technological break-through like SS7, ISUP, CPA ( Call Progress Analysis), accuracy and speed of speech recognition or the or intricacies involved in detecting disconnect tone, engage tone.

They simply care about what menus they hear and if the options they press or speak works! They are least bothered about the hard work some one may have put in to detect her key presses, or recognise heavily accented English numerals, but only if the IVR retrieves the information it promised in its menu. The appreciate only when they can understand the information read out to her listening first time without having to press a key to listen again!

It may not be possible to satisfy all the users of an IVR system, but by using well scripted menus in simple language and intelligently constructed sentences may surely help majority of the people to use IVR system without having to learn the IVR before using it.

The answer to all these problems faced by IVR users and making IVR more useful and user friendly is ‘scripting of the IVR menus’! Script writing for IVR means, writing the IVR menu options in simplest language, well formed sentence so that the listener understands the message accurately without having to concentrate.

IVR scripting can be used in three areas to improve IVR usability:-

1. Scripting the menus
2. Dividing complex menus to simple sub menus
3. Scripting the phrases used for providing information

1. Scripting the Menus

This is quite straight forward. The menu options where IVR gives some options to the IVR user to either press telephone keys, or speak some word or phrase, should be properly scripted. Accuracy of the options is of course a must and forgone conclusion. For example, if the menu says, “To transfer your call to a customer care executive, please press 9″, then on pressing 9 by the caller, the IVR should transfer the call to customer care executive, not to the main menu!

2. Dividing complex menus

Script writers will divide complex options or large options will divide into some groups, and make it two level menus, in place of one. This will not only help first time callers, but also make it more user friendly faster with using ‘cut through’ key pressing!

3. Scripting phrases

Now a days, IVR has to retrieve many information from various locations through either database look up or by using API. Also, it may have retrieve information in bits and pieces from different servers, then knit them together, and then finally produce a sentence which would present a complete required message/information to the IVR user! Now that may not be easy for an IVR engineer! So, one must use a professional script writer for writing these phrases either to be recorded or used with TTS.

Without proper scripts used in IVR menus and in information, IVR will not be usable at all, even by expert IVR users! It will be very frustrating for users and all the great technologies used to design and develop IVR system will completely go waste!

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) System is solution that perform specific tasks related to presenting, sharing gathering information of a company with its customers or any one over phone. With fast development of internet, IVR systems too have moved from on-premise system to hosted service.

How it evolved
Like any other computer software, IVR has evolved from standalone application to highly networked application with many intelligence as per industry where it is being used. For example, a typical voice portal application fetches data from many different servers located at various geographical locations. The main CTI server is normally located at telecom service provider while all contents, MIS etc are contactly updated, monitored from office of the voice portal operators, all using internet as backbone.
Similarly, other IVR applications like complaint management, company information, IVR survey, hotel information etc. could be hosted at remote sites and its activities, reports could be viewed, analyzed live using internet connection or on website. So, IVR as a hosted service has evolved and is growing.

How it works

Hosted IVR service providers offers the following services to its customer:-

1. Dedicated Telephone number which will receive calls from/make calls to its customers.
2. DIY ( Do it yourself) visual tools for designing their IVR call flow
3. Third party database integration or integration with existing CRM ( Customer Resource Management) software.
4. Any customised call flow implementation
5. Maintenance, upgrade of the IVR system.

A hosted IVR service provider has infrastructure which is already connected to telecom operators for managing telephone call related activities as well as integration of CTI boards with telephone switch, call routing. It also has CDR MIS available online for any customers for their allotted telephone numbers or channel(s). It can allocate more channels to handle more calls simultaneously.

A hosted IVR customer only need to worry about their application part, their call flow, IVR prompts, script etc.

Advantages

• People who are not convinced about success of IVR implementation or its usefulness for his business process, using hosted IVR service is the best option. As hosted IVR service offers him quickest time for go live with an IVR system.
• Initial cost of CTI board, time spent on integration with telephone switch etc. are avoided while using a hosted IVR service.

Available tools
There are many tools which can be used for hosted IVR services. Invox, Apexvoice, Pronexus VBVoice, CT ADE etc. are few tools which are widely used for hosted IVR service.

Hosted IVR has started in India in the form of Bulk outbound voice messages recently which is being increasingly used for political campaign, awareness campaign, e-governance as well as voice advertising. “Click to Call” is another hosted IVR service which is growing in India recently.

I had visited India Telecom 2009 exhibition held from 3rd December 2009 to 5th December 2009 at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, India. Though it was mainly an exhibition about Indian Telecom Industry, but I found many companies from IVR industries present there. I thought I would update about them.

These are the companies I found :-

1. Aculab
It came with CTI boards VXML interpreter. While I was visiting the stall, there were some visitors and I did not speak to anyone, did not fail to pick up their brochures. But I think, Aculab got good number of visitors.

ACULAB at India Telecom 2009 Exhibition

2. OpenVox
Among many Chinese Telecom companies in the exhibition, I never expected to see Openvox. I was looking for Miss Lily who commented about Donjin DN300 board. They were offering various IP PBX solutions based on Asterisk. I think, would start working on building PABX using Asterisk too.

OPENVOX at Indian Telecom 2009 Exhibition

3. Synway
Synway was there too with their many CTI boards. When I saw OpenVox, I was certain to see Synway too. Synway is now quite known in CTI market in India. There were many visitors when I was passing through it.

SYNWAY at Indian Telecom 2009 Exhibition

4. Alliance Infotech
I saw stall of Alliance Infotech too. It is a Indian IVR company, based in delhi and they are also reseller of Digium boards. I forgot to take a picture of their stall.

After seeing the above IVR related companies, I was hoping, I might get to see about few more too! For example Dialogic, Donjin, Pronexus with VBVoice, Invox with their IVR designer products as well as Hosted PBX, Syntellect with their Envox products. But no, they were not there!

Overall, I think, there were less visitors this time at India Telecom 2009. There were many notable absentees. Also, many stalls were empty. If the empty stalls and lesser crowd at India Telecom 2009 exhibition in crowded India with 1.2 billion population, are any indication, than, most probably, Indian Telecom industry may not be doing very well in 2009.

Though I have previously written about tools for developing IVR software as well as standardised VoiceXML based IVR Software, I was always thinking about writing rapid application development tools for developing simple to complex and large IVR software available in the market presently.

What is Rapid Application Development Tools for IVR Software ?
These are the tools like a Microsoft Visual Studio used for rapidly developing IVR Software as per IVR call flow. While Microsoft Visual Studio is very vast and supports many kind of applications, RAD for IVR Software deals only with IVR Software or IVR kind of voice application. For example, Auto Dialer, Voice Mail, Auto Attendant etc.
Normally they have beautiful GUI ( Graphics User Interface) for implementing IVR Call flow with graphical tools for controlling CTI board related and Voice Related functions. They provide visual tools implementing IVR Call Flow with minimum requirement of actual coding.
They use their own scripting for IVR Application with own syntax or syntax of standard computer programming language like basic, C. Some even provide controls (pre-compiled executable API code for specific function, can be used as it is) to be used standard Software Development Environment like .NET, Visual Basic etc.

I think there is a scope for comparing three ways to develop IVR Software or any Voice Applications as a whole. The three ways to develop IVR Software are:
1. Legacy IVR Software using native API of CTI boards using C++
2. Using open standard VoiceXML
3. Using Rapid Application Development Tools like VBVoice

In my last post about about Legacy IVRS and VoiceXML IVRS, I tried to compare pros and cons between first two in the above list. Here I would like to mention few benefits of using RAD tools for developing IVR Software.

1. One can rapidly develop IVR Software as the name suggests. The developer does not have to worry about CTI Board related functions as they are already built-in the RAD tools, tried and tested with many CTI Boards.
2. Short learning curve for developing IVR Software. As RAD tools use very simple, easy human kind of language as well as visual tools, it becomes very easy for anyone to develop IVR Software quickly.
3. Support Multiple CTI Boards. This may be one of the major advantages for using RAD tools. As RAD tools provide support for CTI boards from multiple vendors, the developer need not re-develop his IVR Application from scratch while changing CTI Cards.
4. Development Support. RAD Tools providers good support in developing the IVR Software and it comes handy as C++ developer may get stuck somewhere and nowhere to turn for help, but himself.
5. The IVR and other voice applications are getting more and more complex day by day. So, RAD tools gives an IVR Developers option to concentrate more on the call flow and IVR usability aspects than spending time on CTI board interfacing.

As I belong to old school of development, I always advocate use of good old C++ for writing stable, robust and working round the clock software. And I feel RAD Tools may not be suitable for large, complex and enterprise IVR or Voice Applications.

But recently I had tested one RAD tool for developing IVR Application, namely VBVoice 5.6.1 from PRONEXUS INC. I hope to write about this and comparing it with other RAD tools in near future.