| Platform SDK: Web Telephony Engine |
Designing and producing interactive voice response (IVR) applications by means of traditional methods is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive. Highly-skilled designers and programmers must work closely with the customer to specify, test, and implement an IVR application. Redesigning or reprogramming a traditional IVR application is also difficult and costly. As a result, IVR applications have been restricted to large scale, repetitive applications.
By contrast, Web telephony brings the convenience of Web authoring to the IVR development world. Web Telephony Engine (WTE) lets IVR developers use HTML and other Web authoring technologies such as scripting, Java, Microsoft® ActiveX® and Active Server Pages (ASP) to design, publish, and refine IVR applications quickly and efficiently.
WTE makes it possible to create a single application, called a dual-access application, that is accessible to both graphical browsers and telephone users. In a dual-access application, it is possible to show parts of an application's HTML content in one medium and not another. For example, content involving telephony operations would be hidden from the user of a Web browser and descriptive text voice files would be substituted for graphics when a user accessed the application by telephone.
Web telephony is distributable; that is, the actual Web Telephony Engine can be located anywhere, as long as it can connect to your Web server through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The WTE application can run on any Web server that supports server-side scripting.
Web telephony lets developers publish information, solicit user input, create links, execute telephony-specific commands, and access peripheral technologies such as unified messaging and databases.
WTE supports Microsoft Telephony Overview (TAPI) 3.0. This means that you can use any telephony service provider that supports TAPI, including voice boards, modems, and voice over an IP connection. You can even combine several platforms at once, or change them. This is all transparent to the application.