Speech Recognition Telephone Systems and VoIP

Speech recognition telephone systems are being increasingly used in the corporate setting, due in large part to the implementation of VoIP (Voice-over Internet Protocol). According to a study conducted by Synergy Research, IP telephony powered enterprises enjoyed revenues of more than $4 billion in 2005. This number continues to grow as improved network designs and industry standards have enabled VoIP to fuel the successful deployment of speech recognition telephone systems.

How the Technologies Come Together

In past days, businesses wanting to incorporate speech recognition telephone systems generally had to rely on various factors: a single vendor's proprietary tools and monolithic hardware, costly training, and having the vast knowledge of PBX-based protocols. They also had to endure the time and effort required to maintain separate speech recognition telephone systems for their communications and data services.

These tasks made the deployment of speech recognition technology very complex and expensive, basically limiting it to larger enterprises. As business operations have moved towards VoIP, thriving corporations and small companies can both replace insufficient hardware and vendor specific components with open standardized, distributed elements. All the benefits of VoIP have simplified the deployment of speech recognition telephone systems while making these operations more affordable.

Important VoIP components

There are essentially three elements in today's VoIP network: IP-PBX (Internet Protocol-Private Branch eXchange) which manages the network's handsets, the VoIP gateway to provide a phone connection and the IP media server which handles media processing. Companies can purchase these elements from one provider, but also have the freedom to select a nice blend of components from various vendors.

Speech recognition telephone systems and other applications that are added to a VoIP network usually reside on what is known as an application server. If the server requires media processing for any one of its applications, it makes a request to the IP media server. From there, the IP media server processes the request by allocating and managing the media streams so they match the requirements of a specific application. For IVR (Interactive Voice Response) applications, the server runs prompts, specifies DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency and uses VoiceXML to process scripts.

Benefits of The VoIP Model

The VoIP network model serves benefit to enterprises in the same way the carrier industry benefits an (IMS) IP Multimedia Subsystem model. The blueprint for IMS allows developers to survive without application silos and rely on a distributed architecture that enables the swift creation of VoIP powered speech recognition telephone systems. Similar to the IMS structure, the VoIP model allows the independent scaling of each functional element. For instance, if an enterprise needs to accommodate a growth in call volume, all it has to do is implement more VoIP gateways rather than reconfiguring the IP-PBX. If it needs to incorporate additional speech recognition telephone systems, it can simply incorporate more application servers.

Conclusion

Speech recognition telephone systems in the corporate environment are able to excel thanks to VoIP's ability to seamlessly integrate voice and data. By moving to this network model, applications can be deployed faster and more effectively. With the ease and cost efficiency VoIP offers, more companies are moving away from traditional communications to power their business with speech recognition telephone systems.