Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category
Monday, February 11th, 2008 by avery
Since the mid-90s, the enterprise voice world has been stuck in a rut. By 1997, every call center or large enterprise had chosen its primary carrier, its PBX supplier and its IVR vendor. During this time, it was all about proprietary technology. If you bought a Lucent (now Avaya) G3R switch, you did all your internal wiring based on the Lucent specification. You also bought Lucent phones which only worked with Lucent’s proprietary line-side protocol. You configured your Lucent switch to work with the carrier’s signaling, and either you purchased Lucent’s Conversant IVR platform or dealt with a third party IVR which had limited capabilities to pass caller entered data back to the switch. Not that I’m picking on Avaya here. Nortel, Alcatel, Ericsson, NEC and Siemens all contributed to this vendor exclusive model.
Read more »
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »
Thursday, January 24th, 2008 by avery
In large enterprises across the globe, corporations are quickly realizing that with the migration to soft-PBXes and VoIP, the artificial barrier between the IT and Telecom organizations is ready to come down. It hasn’t been a fast transition: the first time I experienced this was over six years ago when my director of Telecom services was promoted into a VP role that encompassed all applications and infrastructure - web, mainframe and voice.
Read more »
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2007 by avery
There is a general myth that people should be able to converse with a system - either by phone or on the web - just like they were talking to a human. In fact certain voice applications even go as far as to name their personas. The idea is that by combining advanced personas and natural language understanding - the ability for a caller to interact with a platform using normal speaking patterns - you’ll create a better user experience.
Once considered the penultimate technology for search engines, Google’s Head of Research believes that natural language doesn’t deliver much benefit for end users. With speech engine providers and application development companies putting so much emphasis on natural language and “How May I Help You” applications, it is time to take a cue from the mighty search engine provider and re-evaluate the industry’s priorities.
Read more »
Posted in Commentary, voice | No Comments »
