IP Telephony Contact Centers Mobility Services

Avaya Voice Portal

Overview
Avaya Voice Portal is a Web Services based self service platform that brings together the power of Web Services and IP Telephony to create more powerful, profitable, and satisfying speech and touch-tone solutions. With Avaya Voice Portal, companies can better leverage the power of speech to expand reach and increase productivity of customers and users, offer consistent responsiveness and high quality care, and reduce the costs of deployment and customer service.

PRODUCT BRIEF

Highlights
Avaya Voice Portal enables businesses to harness sophisticated voice and speech enablement technologies to increase deployment of self service automation capable of serving global, international, and multi-lingual customers. Designed specifically for todays Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), IP Telephony for telephony integration, and advanced Contact Center support, Voice Portal is the ideal platform for deployment of mission critical voice self service applications. Voice Portal allows you to speech enable new services and web applications across your existing IT infrastructure. With support for Enterprise and Webbased integration and use of flexible Web Services based integrations, Voice Portal delivers rapid services deployment, a lower total cost of ownership and ultimately a stronger return on investment than traditional IVR platforms. Voice Portal is deployed on standard Linux/Intel/AMD servers and supports integration with market leading IP technologies. Businesses integrate with Avaya Communication Manager via enterprise communication standards such as H.323 and SIP and contact centers can leverage existing vectoring and CTI investments. The solution also provides open standards based integrations to leading speech technologies from IBM and Scansoft. Voice Portal includes at no additional cost an industrystandard based application development environment, Avaya Dialog Designer, for the design, simulation, debugging, and deployment of VoiceXML speech and touch-tone applications. Dialog Designer generates Java Servlet based web applications which are installed on a customer provided

server running the IBM WebSphere Server or Apache Tomcat Java Server software. As Avaya Dialog Designer Applications are supported for both Avaya IR and for Avaya Voice Portal, application portability from an Avaya IR to a Voice Portal is maintained. Avayas common VoiceXML certified browser technology ensures a more seamless deployment of VoiceXML applications across Dialog Designer, Interactive Response, and Voice Portal platforms. Pre-built integrations simplify handoff between self and assisted service workflows through integration with Avaya Customer Interaction Suite contact management solutions such as Avaya Interaction Center and Avaya Call Center software. Voice Portal applications can access business rules and workflow in Interaction Center to determine treatment in the self service application. The results of the self service interaction can be sent to Interaction Center for use in routing or self service reporting. In addition, Support of the industry standard VoiceXML 2.0 specification through the Voice Portals Voice Browser offers application developers with the flexibility to write applications in their development environment of choice.

Key Benefits
Lower services costs with convenient 24/7 speech automation of routine call center and online transaction and inquiries like account balance, order status and inventory availability. More easily utilize speech to offer services not possible with touch-tone such as name and address recognition secure voice ID technology, or services based on alpha/numeric symbol recognition such as stock symbols.

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2 IP Telephony based architecture drastically lowers costs while supporting high availability deployments without additional costs. Supports IT Web Application Infrastructure through support of standards such as VoiceXML, J2EE, Web Services and MRCP. Supports touch-tone and speech application development based on Eclipse, an open source IT development environment Includes centralized application management tools and access with standard Web-based integration and included SNMP support. VoiceXML 2.0 Voice Browser collects touch-tones and grammar based speech recognition events, plays prerecorded phrases and interfaces to support generation of synthesized text-to-speech, processes events, and generates events for call records. Interfaces to Avaya IP Telephony. Supports integrations to Avaya Communication Manager version 2.1 and later. Terminates H.323 integrations from Communication Manager and supports RTP/RTCP (bearer channel) via the G.711 codec. Interfaces to Avaya Contact Center infrastructure. Passes data such as Queue Position, Expected Wait Time, Dialed (Entered) Digits, plus many other pieces of information from Call Center Vectors to the MPP for more intelligent and personalized self service response. Supports licenses for a dynamic number of concurrent VoiceXML sessions, their associated IP Endpoint Registrations, associations with ASR and TTS resources, and associated initiation criteria (ANI/DNIS) to web address (http://application) to trigger applications. Supports Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) to external Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-speech (TTS) Resources from leading speech technology partners. The Media Processing Platform runs on Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3.0 Certified Hardware Platforms provided either by the customer or orderable through Avaya as the S8500 communication server.

Components
Voice Portal supports Voice and Self Service applications within the enterprise information technology (IT) environment. The Avaya Voice Portal includes three primary software components: Media Processing Platform Application Execution and Design Environment Voice Portal Management System

Media Processing Platform

The Media Processing Platform (MPP) is a key component of the voice portal architecture and performs the following functions:

Application Execution and Design Environment

Applications can be written in a number of ways based on the standard VoiceXML 2.0 specification. Businesses and independent software developers can write applications by hand-coding VoiceXML and ECMA script, by using an environment to write static VoiceXML such as IVR designer or IBM WebSphere Speech Application Developer, or can use an environment to generate dynamic VoiceXML to drive other VoiceXML 2.0 certified environments. Avaya Dialog Designer is a complete laptop development environment allowing faster and less
Figure 1: Key components of Voice Portal software. Voice Portal software was specifically designed for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) running across todays IP Telephony based architectures.

costly application design, coding, debugging, testing, simulation and deployment. Applications are designed

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3 using a graphical drag and drop metaphor allowing for rapid application development. Dialog Designer includes an embedded VoiceXML browser allowing simulation of applications; the same VoiceXML browser is integrated within Voice Portal and Interactive Response offering developers an additional level of assurance that applications deployed will operate as expected. The Voice Portal Management System performs fail-over in case of loss of a MPP by reclaiming VoiceXML licenses and registrations from the affected MPP. It automatically redeploys those licenses and registrations to spare capacity (on provisioned server) or to a spare server offering businesses the highest levels of availability of mission critical customer self service applications. VPMS includes a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Management Information Base (MIB) to external Network Management Systems such as IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView. Avaya Voice Portal collects a rich set of call detail, session detail and application records. These events are presented in a set of pre-built Web-based Reports for management. In addition, Avaya Voice Portal allows access of these records through an open interface for integration into a customer provided reporting system (such as Crystal Reports) or into Operational Analyst for end to end reporting integration. integration points, and application initiation criteria (mapping of ANI/DNIS to http://URI).

Voice Portal Management System

The Voice Portal Management System (VPMS) is an easy to use Web-based interface for all management functions and plays a key role bridging integration with the communications infrastructure and the IT environment. VPMS provides centralized operations, administration, management and provisioning interfaces across the voice portal system. The VPMS supports up to 15 Media Processing Platforms and interfaces to a centralized WebLM license manager for supporting any number of concurrent VoiceXML sessions across the enterprise. The VPMS distributes VoiceXML licenses across the set of provisioned MPPs and associates and distributes associated IP Endpoint registrations, speech engine

Figure 2: Unlike traditional Interactive Voice Response platforms, Voice Portal was specifically designed for deployment across distributed IP telephony based networks allowing businesses to more flexibly design, deploy, operate, and manage applications where there are existing skills and resources.

Features & Benefits

Feature
Flexible, scalable IP architecture

Benefit
Multiple server options and flexible configurations allow enterprises to more effectively meet design, capacity, and price criteria while supporting IT sourcing and management Guidelines. Makes CTI and Contact Center integration accessible to IT staffs opening the possibilities to dynamic self-service applications built on dynamic call center and contact center events. Common VoiceXML 2.0 browser across platforms reduce application deployment risks and ensures a consistent user experience. Drives lower integration and support costs through use of existing expertise in Java and Web Services based integrations. Transferable platform licenses preserve self service solution investments. Interactive Response ports under current maintenance can be converted to Voice Portal licenses without additional cost. Avaya Global Services and DevConnect Members provide local support, solutions discovery, applications development, and professional services to meet business needs.

Integrated self and assisted service Common VoiceXML Voice Browser Open Standards-based Interfaces Flexible path to Open IP based speech enabled services Worldwide Services and Support

Systems Supported
Features
Media Processing Platform VoiceXML 2.0 Certified Browser VoIP Support for Avaya Communication Manager 2.1 and newer via H.323/RTP MRCP v1 integration to external speech resources Application Execution and Deployment IBM WebSphere Express 6.0, WebSphere 5.1 Dialog Designer API (Java and GUI IDE) Voice Portal Management System Active management of VP elements; Error/Alarming and Failover Centralized Reporting and detail record access SNMP v1,2,3 Speech Engines, Text to Speech, and Grammar support Multiple concurrent languages IBM WebSphere Voice Server 5.1.3 Scansoft/Nuance Others via MRCP RedHat Linux Enterprise 3.0 Certified Platforms IBM x306 based servers such as the Avaya S8500 Linux/Intel/AMD Servers Apache Tomcat 5.1 Windows 2000, Windows XP, Solaris 8, Linux RedHat Enterprise 3.0 RedHat Linux Enterprise 3.0 Certified Platforms IBM x306 based servers such as the Avaya S8500 Linux/Intel/AMD Servers Avaya S8300/S8500/S8700, Avaya G350/G650, Medpro, Crossfire

Platforms, Protocols, Interfaces

About Avaya
Avaya enables businesses to achieve superior results by designing, building and managing their communications infrastructure and solutions. For over one million businesses worldwide, including more than 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500, Avayas embedded solutions help businesses enhance value, improve productivity and create competitive advantage by allowing people to be more productive and create more intelligent processes that satisfy customers. For businesses large and small, Avaya is a world leader in secure, reliable IP telephony systems, communications applications and full life-cycle services. Driving the convergence of embedded voice and data communications with business applications, Avaya is distinguished by its combination of comprehensive, world-class products and services. Avaya helps customers across the globe leverage existing and new networks to achieve superior business results.

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