Voice services get real

Development costs and hardware investment have prevented service providers and carriers from introducing value-added, voice interactive services as quickly as marketplace demand grows. The use of standards and software-based integration cuts down these barriers

Voice information services (VIS) practices, now largely software-based, can simplify the launch of new voice-enabled services. Organizations that make decisions about voice-enabled services can reduce many of the development-related uncertainties and expenses of moving forward. Software is today’s key. 

The fundamental challenge for service and network equipment providers is how to launch new, voice-enabled services that offer the return on investment (ROI) companies need, scale easily as the service grows by leaps and bounds or, in the worst case, limit the investment if the service is unsuccessful.

Companies that wanted to expand their suite of voice-enabled services previously have had to weigh lengthy development cycles and justify enormous expenses of new technology implementations just to get a new service to the test market stage. One reason the hurdles are substantial is the many layers of complex technology encountered to integrate all of the various components being mixed together to offer a new service. Developers have had to deal with closed hardware systems, hardware-based processes and proprietary interfaces. Yankee Group research tells us that approximately 52% of the voice services available in the U.S. today are based on proprietary hardware.

The process of working through these layers and integrating them is extremely labor-intensive. Every time developers have needed to create an application, they have had to pick their way carefully through the vertical applications and different technology layers that potentially involve thousands of elements. And updates are difficult to deploy. Combined, these factors drive up the cost of ownership and support contracts to over 25% more than current software options.

A new class of integrated media platforms addresses these complications. It’s the media platform that now manages the low-level integration needed between the various networks and technologies. The media platform is built to provide all the low-level media calls, handle call control and integrate to speech resources like automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) applications.

The bottom line is that the media platform, in conjunction with standard developer interfaces like voice XML (VXML) enable service applications to be written independently of the network because the media platform deals transparently with the interface between the various network components. This singular advantage also means that service providers can assign fewer development resources and make smaller investments to deliver voice interactive services.

People Already Love Voice

There already are companies around the world using media platforms and directly developing with standard interfaces to successfully offer exciting, new services. Technical groups from Hewlett-Packard have been involved with projects at various VXML development companies including HeyAnita, PipeBeach (which was acquired by HP in July) and SpeechDesign. These companies are developing entertainment portals, multimedia message service (MMS) voice gateways, gaming, FunMail services and more.

Seeing the high appeal of these solutions, it’s not surprising to find industry trade reports that companies like Orange, Vodafone, SFR and Telefonica have recently implemented media platforms.

RELATED ARTICLE Media platforms in the real world

Real cases illustrating how voice services are increasingly important for customers and their providers are getting easier to find. Customers can find new voice-based services that, for example, cater to mobile professionals who need voice access to corporate e-mail, voice-activated dialing and directory assistance, alerts and notifications, as well as both location- and content-based applications such as driving instructions and stock quotes.

Carriers, of course, are enthusiastic about these new offerings because they are able to generate incremental, subscription-based revenue, increase minutes of usage and even reduce churn by their leadership in services.

Listen-in for Flexibility

Flexibility is a key reason and advantage to using the latest standards-based technology. Carriers will have the flexibility to deploy VXML-based solutions and choose from a variety of leading ASR and TTS engines. They can even choose port densities and scale the services based more on marketplace demand rather than interlocking requirements and dependencies of network elements.

The role of open standards such as VXML and Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) also facilitates reductions in development costs. Consider that already there are more than 100,000 VXML developers using a uniform standard. This is a sizeable knowledge base that’s more accessible as a resource, in general, and inherently better equipped than the smaller field of developers who’ve been specially trained and bound to proprietary systems. By using VXML, for example, a service provider’s development team can quickly produce new services by leveraging existing web content and infrastructure such as application servers.

Integrated media platforms are expected to have a positive impact on another obstacle to offering new services—the heavy investment costs inherent in the process of rolling out untested services.

Integrated media platforms are expected to have a positive impact on another obstacle to offering new services—the heavy investment costs inherent in the process of rolling out untested services. New services have often required the installation of prohibitively expense hardware and extensive development. By using the new integration platforms, which fully leverage open systems, carriers can quickly implement and integrate more and more voice capabilities, and even more voice ports, without having to make corresponding “forklift upgrades” to the existing infrastructure.

This avoidance of costly investments in infrastructure is possible because much of the voice capabilities in integrated media platforms come from software, which is faster and cheaper to add or change than telecommunications hardware. Provisioning voice services through a software-based approach now is reasonably expected to save approximately 25% in total cost of ownership versus traditional hardware-based solutions. Furthermore, if a new service does not gain acceptance in the marketplace, the added infrastructure can be easily leveraged for many other existing applications, or even those yet to be developed.

The above factors are clearly important for implementing new services. Yet, service providers and network equipment providers also must be concerned with extending the life of legacy environments. Over half of the voice services in North America are still on proprietary systems. Most of these systems can be migrated and gain ROI within 12 months, thanks largely to dramatically reduced support and development costs.

Linking existing service applications with burgeoning voice and speech services is key, and it is easily within the role of integrated media platforms. The media platform not only integrates legacy systems quickly, but because of the flexibility of software-based digital signal processing (Soft DSP), it can easily be leveraged to IP-based networks without any hardware changes or forklift upgrades.

Carriers are already showing how easily new voice services can be deployed without also rebuilding their entire network. It’s also significant that these carriers have gained considerable costs savings by migrating existing applications from proprietary systems to new, open systems. Standard computing has finally made its way to telecom, and the savings mean that it is here to stay.

Daniel Dorr is the Americas Business Manager for HP's Interactive Media product line. He can be reached at daniel.dorr@hp.com.

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Media platforms in the real world

By Damien Leretaille

Using a media platform solution has helped our company, Eloquant, quickly generating new revenue. We have built a cost-effective, carrier grade infrastructure to host and deliver content and various applications serving customers with sports updates, an e-mail reader, logo/ringtones, alerts and a voice portal. All of our applications are based on a single media infrastructure, HP’s OpenCall Media Platform (OCMP).

We already have 25 applications in production on this platform. Speech resources are also implemented via a standard interface called the media resource control protocol (MRCP). This approach makes it possible to create new economies and businesses using VoiceXML. Before VoiceXML, service providers pre-developed and hosted their own applications and subscribers had to change providers if they wanted to access new services.

One of the most successful applications of this technology is the Route du Rhum yacht race. This is the “Super Bowl of yachting” in France, a demanding trans-Atlantic race that draws wide interest. To support this interest, our service enables all France Telecom customers to get real-time updates on the last position of racing yachts, weather bulletins and even interviews from the skippers. The reports are updated automatically five times per day and then quickly made accessible via the Internet, or by using voice commands on the telephone.

Because of our success with this service, we have implemented additional sports-oriented, voice-services throughout Europe. Interestingly, one of the challenges involved with reporting on sporting events is that they are characterized by huge spikes in demand followed by big silences. We needed to provision for the spikes without paying for physical provisioning that would all too frequently remain idle.

In this situation, we have to be able to quickly configure 2000 lines in an hour for a major event, with just a few mouse clicks. Our developers used the HP OCMP and designed a solution to accomplish the network configurations with no additional physical provisioning. They also leveraged the media platform’s integration capabilities to connect the new services to two optical backbones, which achieved immediate connectivity across the continent.

Damien Leretaille is VP Sales & Marketing for Eloquant, which is located near Grenoble, France. He can be reached at damien.leretaille@eloquant.com.

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