3G

Third generation of mobile telephony systems – Usually identified as Universal Mobile Telecommunication Service (UMTS). Provides high speed data transmission and support of multimedia applications such as video and Internet access.

Actions category

Object category containing all objects used for extended dialog control. The Actions category consists of the following object types: Hyperlink, Pause, Recording, Transfer, Exit.

Active grammar

A speech or DTMF grammar that is currently active and used by the speech recognition system. The active grammar is defined on top of the active vocabulary.

ANI

Automatic Number Identification. A service that provides the caller’s number to the receiving equipment. See also DNIS.

API

Application Programming Interface. Interface that applications use to access other services and to communicate with other systems.

ASR

Automated Speech Recognition. Modern systems that use speech instead of DTMF as input and respond to the recognized utterances.

Audio object

Object type belonging to the Resources category. Audio objects refer to prerecorded audio that can be played back within an Output object.

Automated service

Dialog where the user interacts with the system through a telephone. Incorporates a certain task or workflow in dialog and interaction units. The system may use speech recognition or DTMF to ‘understand’ the caller and to react to the responses given. Especially voice services need an intelligent VUI design to allow efficient interaction.

Autonomous object

Objects that are visible and accessible within the Object Browser and can be added to other dialogs.

Barge-in

Functionality that allows callers to interrupt prompts and respond without waiting until the output has finished. This requires the use of echo cancellation technology to subtract the machine output from the incoming data stream. Barge-in typically changes the turn taking characteristics of the application. Alternatively referred to as „cut-through“, „talk-over“, and also „talk-through“.

BI

Abbreviation of Business Intelligence.

Bridged transfer

Bridged transfer is used in VoiceXML to indicate that the browser does not hang up after the call transfer, creating a three-way call with the user, browser and called party. See also Call Transfer.

Built-in grammar

Predefined set of grammars of different types to allow a faster application development. VoiceXML 2.0 defines the following as standard built-in grammars: Boolean, date, digit, currency, number, phone, and time. ASR vendors typically allow building new built-in grammar classes.

Business data capture

The capability of VoiceObjects Server to capture data at call time that can help measure the performance of a phone application in terms of accomplished business tasks. Such data includes overall success rates per task, reasons for incomplete tasks, the duration of a task within the entire call, etc. Data is captured and stored by the server component Infostore.

Business Intelligence

A process or a set of tools that enables business users to navigate through a Data Warehouse without the need of coding SQL. Provided functionality includes data visualization, complex analysis and querying.

Business reports

A category of VoiceObjects Analyzer reports to provide business and marketing representatives with insight into data that can help measuring the overall success of a phone application. See also Business data capture

Business Task object

Object type belonging to the Business Tasks category. Business Task objects represent a task the caller can accomplish while interacting with an application. Task-related data, i.e. application-specific information gathered while the task was processed and general statistics, such as whether a task was successfully completed, the time that a task was active, recognition rates, etc., will automatically be logged to Infostore.

Business Tasks category

Object category containing objects that define a business view of an application on top of the dialog definition itself. The Business Tasks category consists of the following object types: Business Task.

Call detail record file

A protocol filled by media platforms. It contains details of individual calls, such as recognition results, processed VoiceXML pages or application logging.

Call Simulator

A tool to perform load and regression tests on VoiceObjects Server. It can be flexibly configured to define parameters such as number of concurrent sessions, load variation, request rate, etc. This tool is not part of the VoiceObjects product but comes as a Professional Service package upon request.

Call transfer

A typical functionality of a telephony platform that allows connecting a call to another party. See also Bridged Transfer.

Cascading Style Sheets

A style sheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style Web pages written in HTML and XHTML.

Case object

Object type belonging to the Logic category. Case objects represent a standard CASE or SWITCH CASE construct as in any standard programming or scripting language.

CCXML

Call Control eXtended Markup Language – W3C standard for controlling aspects such as call transfer and conferencing on telephony platforms and telephony networks. CCXML is referenced by VoiceXML and SALT.

CGI

Common Gateway Interface. A standard for external gateway programs to interface with information servers such as HTTP servers.

Channel

See Phone channel.

Clipboard

Functionality of Desktop for Web. The Clipboard folder in the Object Browser is used to temporarily hold dialog objects of various types. It can be used to apply commands like delete, append, insert, or replace on a set of objects.

Cluster management

A set of functionalities provided by VoiceObjects to enable the efficient administration of carrier-grade installations. A cluster denotes a set of multiple machines running one or more VoiceObjects Servers. With cluster management, these multiple machines can be administered as a single logical unit without the need to make adjustments on each of them.

Collection object

Object type belonging to the Logic category. Collection objects represent a collection of data values that can be accessed element wise with an index key similar to a spreadsheet or a table in a relational database.

Collection phase

The collection phase is the place in the OSDM dialog flow where a specific item type (e.g. a date, a string of digits) is collected from the caller.

Components category

Object category containing all objects used to describe the main dialog processing capabilities of an application. The Components category consists of the following object types: Module, Input, Output, Sequence, Menu, Confirmation, List.

Concurrent session

Dialog sessions that are being handled in parallel by VoiceObjects Server. Limits on the maximum number of concurrent sessions can be specified in the license key, and for individual servers and services.

Confidence level

Measure of how sure the recognizer is about what the caller said. Usually a number between 0 and 99 (depends on the media platform), with very high numbers indicating high confidence in the answer. The confidence score is compared to the confidence threshold to determine the application behavior. See also N-Best List.

Configuration objects

Objects used to configure the VoiceObjects platform. This category includes projects, users, servers and services.

Confirmation

Asking the caller to accept or reject the correctness of one or more pieces of recognized or retrieved information, before proceeding with the dialog flow.

Confirmation object

Object type belonging to the Components category. Confirmation objects represent a dialog component to confirm and if necessary to correct information collected in previous dialog steps.

Confirmation phase

The confirmation phase of an OSDM dialog flow is entered only if the recognition confidence during the collection phase is between the defined values or the confirmation mode is explicitly set to ALWAYS.

Connector

Connectors are configurable connectivity elements to structure external data sources like databases, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or content management systems. Within VoiceObjects connectors are implemented as objects and can be used to feed dynamic content into applications.

Connector framework

Integrates back-end systems through monitored connectors that can easily reuse existing interfaces.

Connector object

Object type belonging to the Resources category. Connector objects enable access to external data sources and back-end systems. They provide an open API (Application Programming Interface) for bi-directional data exchange, such that dynamic content can be integrated into the dialog flow.