Developers Can Speed Speech Application Design with New Re-Usable Software Components from Avaya

Avaya Dialog Designer Elements allow for quicker application creation through pre-built and customizable common speech recognition functions

Speech application developers now have access to a free suite of pre-packaged, re-usable speech dialog components from Avaya that simplify the creation of interactive voice response (IVR) applications. By combining some of the most commonly used speech commands, developers can more quickly and cost-effectively build or enhance customer response systems.

Avaya Inc. is a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services.

With the new Avaya Dialog Designer Elements, designers can rapidly combine pre-built components that ask a caller for credit card information, zip code and phone number, for example, to start creating a speech-driven automated response system rather than having to develop the components each time from the beginning. The components also can be used by companies that want to enhance existing touch-tone-based applications with voice recognition capabilities.

The Avaya Dialog Designer Elements are used with Avaya Dialog Designer, an open, standards-based Integrated Development Environment for Avaya Voice Portal and Avaya Interactive Response. Dialog Designer offers web and speech application developers a reusable drag-and-drop environment for development and maintenance of speech and touch-tone IVR applications.

Gold Systems, Inc. and GM Voices, two members of Avaya’s DevConnect program, were integral to the development of the Dialog Designer Elements. Gold Systems built Dialog Designer Elements, incorporating such features as support for both speech and touch-tone inputs, as well as retry and re-prompting logic based on speech recognition confidence scoring, helping to assure the accurate understanding of what people say when interacting with the
self-service applications. GM Voices provided professionally recorded, high-quality voice prompts for the components.

“More companies are using speech recognition as an integral way they manage their customer-facing operations, including ordering and service support,” said Michael Perry, director, Self-Service Solutions, Avaya. “Avaya, working with our partners, has provided businesses with a set of flexible, easy-to-use software tools that allows them to quickly extend and change the information they provide through speech recognition systems. They’ll be able to re-use existing speech assets, saving valuable development time, and be able to offer new services to customers more quickly.”

Dialog Designer Elements are designed to be vendor-neutral with respect to speech recognition, and have been tested using both Nuance and IBM speech recognition engines. All prompting and caller input is designed around a directed dialog paradigm in which the caller is directed to speak one piece of information per prompt.

The initial set of Dialog Designer Elements supports English-speaking callers via pre-recorded, professional voice-quality prompts and U.S. English speech recognition grammars and Text-to-Speech (TTS) capabilities. Using Dialog Designer, developers can easily modify the Dialog Designer Elements with additional application logic and replace the pre-recorded prompts in order to support additional languages for both speech recognition and TTS.

Dialog Designer Elements can be downloaded at no-charge from http://share.devconnectprogram.com. Avaya DevConnect members can also download the latest version of Avaya Dialog Designer through the DevConnect Portal at http://www.avaya.com/devconnect.