The WebSphere® Voice zone contains articles, tutorials, code samples, and access to many other resources to help voice application developers and service providers develop, enhance, and maintain their applications. This page provides a brief introduction to the IBM® WebSphere Voice product family, and describes some of the resources available to learn more.
WebSphere Voice is a family of middleware products which enable application developers to provide users of telephones-- wired or wireless-- to conduct business transactions or access information simply by speaking. For example, contact centers, voice portal owners, and telecommunications service providers can use WebSphere Voice to voice-enable business applications for tasks such as:
Accessing bank account information and transactions
Enabling sales reps in the field to access data on the company intranet
Providing voice-activated dialing for telephone subscribers
The WebSphere Voice family includes a runtime server which provides a speech recognition engine and a text-to-speech engine. It also includes voice development tools, utilities, and a telephony platform connector. The server and tools are based on industry-standard VoiceXML and Java™. It provides extensions to the portal environment and enables personalizable voice interaction with the portal. It supports Voice XML and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications.
With more than 40 years of delivering voice solutions and over 200 voice technology patents, IBM is a global leader in providing access to data through end-to-end voice integrated solutions.
How you work with the WebSphere Voice products depends on your role in the development team. Voice application developers use
WebSphere Voice Toolkit.
To run your voice applications in production, you will need some combination of the WebSphere Voice products. You might also need WebSphere Application Server, which is the base product for most WebSphere-based Web applications, and WebSphere Portal, if your application is a portal.
At a conceptual level, within the on demand environment, WebSphere Voice provides access capabilities. You use it to improve communication and collaboration among your employees, customers, partners, and suppliers. Because WebSphere Voice provides enhanced access to information and applications, your business is able to respond in real time to current conditions and information. These capabilities, in turn, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business.
At a more technical level, WebSphere Voice adds to the capabilities provided by WebSphere Application Server, which provides the basis for on demand applications. A major characteristic of an on demand e-business is that it is changes at the rate and pace of demand -- demand for business services, demand for information, and demand for computing capacity. WebSphere Voice helps you quickly extend your current applications to new audiences without having to re-design or rebuild your existing applications.
The system requirements for your voice application depend upon which of the products you select.
WebSphere
Voice Server lets you quickly build and deploy speech recognition and text-to-speech applications
to give users telephone access to information and transactions. WebSphere Voice Server incorporates
four components - a speech recognition engine, a text-to-speech engine, voice application development tools, and a telephony platform connector.
WebSphere Voice Response for
Windows and WebSphere Voice Response for AIX are versatile, powerful voice processing platforms that bring expanded functionality to Interactive
Voice Response (IVR) applications, including advanced speech recognition with WebSphere Voice Server. WebSphere Voice Response supports Java, VoiceXML and native programming models.
WebSphere Voice Toolkit
provides a broad set of tools to help developers create voice application development. It supports VoiceXML and includes editors, testing tools, simulators, reusable components, analysis tools, and other aids to help you get voice applications, including speech recognition and Text-to-Speech, up and running quickly.
Unified Messaging for WebSphere Voice Response
provides a central service that coordinates and provides access to popular communications formats through the interface that is most appropriate at the time.
The Mobile and Speech Middleware category of WebSphere products includes all of the voice products as well as products to enable mobile computing with other devices.
