VoiceXML – an important tool for customer-oriented companies
VoiceXML teaches your computers how to communicate with humans in a natural way. This makes it possible to automate many use cases and to make them safer, faster and cheaper.
The power system of a company failed at night which means that numerous calls and inquiries are to be expected the following morning. In order not to disturb the normal business operations and to “filter out” other telephone inquiries, an announcement text is recorded which informs the callers about the power failure and asks them to press "1" for any further questions in this respect.
The VoiceXML features
VoiceXML (Voice Extended Markup Language) is used to describe processes of a voice dialogue system and is a variant of the programming language XML. It is an open, platform-independent standard. That means that the solution based on it can be integrated into existing customer applications without any problem and is extremely easy to handle. You can easily create voice messages using a graphical interface by combining individual modules as you please or by changing them without much effort.
As no special know-how is required, voice messages cannot only be created by developers or administrators but also by staff members who might not be as technically experienced.
The scenarios for which VoiceXML may be used are manifold. As in the above example, predefined standard messages are played to the callers. It is, however, also possible to use it for outgoing messages as described in the article “Emergency! Please come and help!”. It helps you absorb communication peaks, takes the routine workload off your staff and ensures that emergencies outside regular working hours are managed safely.
What this means for the staff
With VoiceXML incoming calls can be controlled per drag & drop. The contents and business processes are now uniform for all portals (HTML, VoiceXML, ...). The flexible and easy-to-use solution offers optimal dialogue guidance with voice recognition and a text-to-speech feature (meaning that the text entered is digitally converted into voice). Depending on the dialogue step, different redirections may be activated directly over the telephone by means of key entry.
The market share of VoiceXML is estimated to reach 64 percent in the EMEA region and 61.3 percent in the USA by the year 2009 (Datamonitor, March 2005).