The Avaya Unified Communication Center product allows mobile workers to initiate conference calls and manage e-mails, voicemails and calendars using speech from any phone. The 2.0 release boosts its user support to 10,000 subscribers. This release also adds integration with IBM Lotus Notes calendar and contacts, in addition to existing e-mail support for Notes.
Avaya Interactive Response 1.2 expands speech-recognition and text-to-speech capabilities to more than 30 languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Italian. It also operates on higher-capacity servers than previously. Interactive Response is an automated self-service product for accessing information or making transactions by telephone. It aims to automate the handling of routine inquiries from customers and employees.
The new Speech Applications Builder, designed for the Interactive Response platform, provides tools and components to speed up the creation of speech automation services. It uses the VoiceXML standard and contains more than 100 pre-built modules for common functions, such as prompts or retry logic.
Avaya also plans to integrate Interactive Response with IBM’s WebSphere Voice Server 5.1 for availability before the end of the year. Initial language support will be for US English, UK English, Chinese and Japanese. Avaya and IBM announced the cooperative move, which builds on an existing alliance, at SpeechTEK on Monday. Over time, further integration will make customized data from back-end infrastructures (for example, customer information or real-time inventory levels) available to the automated voice service.
The Avaya Unified Communication Center and Interactive Response are available now. Avaya was unable to supply pricing information.
