Says Andre Deetlefs, senior solutions architect at Avaya: Avaya Voice Portal enables companies to use the power of speech to expand reach, increase user productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction. Its open architecture and open standards-based design makes for exceptional ease of integration, expandability and longevity.
 
Deetlefs adds that the cost of delivering services such as routine call centre enquires and online services such as balance enquiries, order status and stock availability is decreased, and the range of services that can be offered is increased. Touch-tone only services are limited: you can do much more when you can perform name and address recognition, secure voice identification, or recognition of alphanumeric symbols such as flight numbers and share symbols, for example, he states.
 
According to Deetlefs, Voice Portal runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms, and is based on IP telephony and standards, including VoiceXML, J2EE, Web Services and Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP). Touch tone and speech application development is based on the open source Eclipse development environment, he adds. Centralised application management tools, Web-based access and SNMP support round out the features that combine to drastically lower costs while offering high availability, he claims.