News

Avaya and Speech Developers

Speech application developers now have access to a free suite of pre-packaged, re-usable 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.

With the new Dialog Designer Elements designers can 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 Elements are used with Dialog Designer, a standards-based Integrated Development Environment that offers a reusable drag-and-drop environment for development and maintenance of speech and touch-tone IVR applications.

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

Case Study

UTDi and FAME

Unified TelData (UTDi) announced that Financial Aid Management for Education (FAME) of Ft. Lauderdale, FL reduced operating costs and improved employee retention through implementation of Avaya’s IP Softphone solution.

FAME operates in the specialized area of processing federal government student financial aid funds for postsecondary education schools, a $110 billion a year industry, and its employees are considered experts in their field. Over the years some workers moved from the Ft. Lauderdale area. In addition, acquisitions of competitors and some of their employees led them to implement a telecommunications system ten years ago that allowed working from anywhere in the U.S.

Chairman Bill Little sought a solution that would streamline this process, reduce costs and provide a pleasant working environment. ”Our number one goal was to protect our employee base as they are our most valuable asset. Our current system provided some of the functionality we needed but was too cumbersome to deliver on efficiency. UTDi and the Avaya solution provided the streamlining, eliminated support issues and lowered operating costs by $2,300 per month.”

911

Avaya introduced Public Safety Communications Solutions that enable 911 centers to adopt technologies required to handle the growing number and types of communications and streamline processes for faster, more effective responses. They help ensure that a call for help will be answered even in the face of broad-scale environmental disasters.

"The majority of 911 communications operations are sorely in need of modernization to function well in today's and tomorrow's communications environments," said Jeff Robertson, executive director, 911 Industry Alliance. "While the system has proven to be a success over the past four decades, it is being left behind by technological change. The typical model is still one of small standalone emergency communications systems using yesterday's analog technologies."

Based on IP Telephony, the solutions make it possible to link multiple centers into municipal, county or state-wide emergency networks. This expands the pool of public safety call takers who can field the increasing volume of calls from diverse devices and technologies. Operators along the network can manage overflow when call volume supersedes the capacity of those in one particular location or when one center is physically inaccessible. Calls can be directed to the most local center first with overflow going to others. Networked 911 centers can also share applications and technologies and distribute the cost over several sites, making migration to next-generation more economically-feasible.

Partners

Avaya and Polycom

Every time two people conduct a video or voice conference instead of traveling roundtrip between Los Angeles and New York they save carbon emissions equivalent to taking one car off the road for a year. According to a recent Telework Exchange study, if people who commute chose to telecommute twice weekly the country could save 9.7 billion gallons of gas and $38.2 billion per year. With the rising cost of oil, growing popularity of corporate sustainability and availability of telepresence and HD video and voice conferencing systems, why travel unnecessarily?

Fortunately more and more companies are reducing corporate travel in favor of virtual meetings. Remote collaboration is of growing importance to large globally-dispersed organizations and SMBs with sustainability objectives as well as countries and governments with vast remote regions like China and India.

Polycom voice, video and telepresence solutions are used for real-time collaboration and virtual meetings, offering communication and collaboration regardless of location. SoundStation conference phones and SpectraLink wireless phone systems integrate with Avaya solutions to offer enterprise-grade voice communication from anywhere within the workplace.

Real-time communication helps improve the speed of business. Wireless telephone systems ensure employees are always available to customers and colleagues. Polycom HD Voice allows people to experience more natural conversations, boosting voice recognition and enhancing productivity.

Avaya Support Tools

Avaya introduced a new set of support tools, available free to its maintenance customers, that use the web to expand and accelerate access to essential information about communications maintenance, troubleshooting and problem resolution. The tools are InSite Knowledge Management, a search engine that places Avaya's database of troubleshooting knowledge at an IT administrator's fingertips, and HealthCheck, a diagnostic tool that analyzes and identifies issues within an Avaya communications system.

InSite search engine uses new technology to let telecom managers and IT administrators quickly find and use content that was previously only available to Avaya engineers. Users simply log into a website, enter a natural-language question in the search box, and receive relevant data culled from more than 28,000 articles created by Avaya experts. Additionally it is self-learning, meaning it archives every query and response in order to provide faster matches to future queries on similar issues. This also helps Avaya more quickly identify troublesome trends based on the high volume of search requests that occur for a particular issue, allowing for rapid customer alerts and fixes.

HealthCheck is a proactive test that customers can run to get a single comprehensive view into what is occurring within their communications network, tracking everything from gateways to end points to circuit packs in order to identify any configuration issues that have caused other problems in the past. It provides this via web by performing an audit revealing how each element of a system is performing, and which components require updates or administrative changes. This is delivered in a virtual report with integrated links to troubleshooting and administration articles. Combining these tools gives valuable new data and reporting tools at no additional cost. The tools also help prevent problems and reduce the impact of issues, since it takes less time to fix them.

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