Voice portal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Voice portals are a type of Web Portal that can be accessed by people entirely by voice. Ideally a voice portal could be an access point for any type of information, service, or transaction found on the Internet. There are two major categories of voice portals, one focused on consumers gaining general access to information and another that focuses on businesses providing tailored access to customer support.

Consumer voice portals (sometimes called voice-portals or vortals), first appeared on the Internet scene in 1999 nearly simultaneously with the launch of Tellme Networks and Quack.com - companies dedicated to providing voice-based access to Internet information to consumers. Quack.com launched its service in March of 2000 and has since obtained the first overall voice portal patent. Technology from Speechworks and Nuance in speech recognition was quickly combined with a wide range of Internet technologies such as application servers, with database technologies of various kinds and with text-to-speech technologies to create a range of interactive voice service for consumer from movie times to stock trading. Quack.com was acquired by AOL in 2000 and relaunched as AOL By Phone later that year.

Enterprise voice portals deliver an integrated platform that manages inbound and outbound voice traffic and agent controls, optimizing how customer calls are processed within the enterprise. Using audible speech, speech recognition or a telephone keypad interface, voice portals provide automated routing of calls to access myriad information regardless of source (flat file, multi-dimensional databases, web page content, etc.) or to live agents based on customer needs. Specific customer needs are matched with agent skill sets to ensure callers receive the most appropriate care. Enterprise voice portals deliver an integrated platform that manages inbound and outbound voice traffic and agent controls, optimizing how customer calls are processed within the enterprise. Using audible speech, speech recognition or a telephone keypad interface, voice portals provide automated routing of calls to access myriad information regardless of source (flat file, multi-dimensional databases, web page content, etc.) or to live agents based on customer needs. Specific customer needs are matched with agent skill sets to ensure callers receive the most appropriate care.

Avaya and Cisco are among the leading providers of customer premise based enterprise voice portals. New versions deliver a hosted platform enabled by IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) standards that ease integration issues by supporting TDM (time division multiplexing) and VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) and delivering tailored applications as part of the integrated, on-demand capabilities. LiveVox, the first Voice Portal company to offer an IMS-based solution, provides core call center components including inbound/self-service, outbound contact and Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), in one integrated application platform.