Kenneth G. Rehor

Sisl: Several Interfaces, Single Logic

Modern interactive services such as information and e-commerce services are becoming increasingly more flexible in the types of user interfaces they support. These interfaces incorporate automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding and include graphical user interfaces on the desktop and web-based interfaces using applets and HTML forms. To what extent can the user interface software be decoupled from the service logic software (the code that defines the essential function of a service)? Decoupling of user interface from service logic directly impacts the flexibility of services, or how easy they are to modify and extend.To explore these issues, we have developed Sisl, an architecture and domain-specific language for designing and implementing interactive services with multiple user interfaces. A key principle underlying Sisl is that all user interfaces to a service share the same service logic. Sisl provides a clean separation between the service logic and the software for a variety of interfaces, including Java applets, HTML pages, speech-based natural language dialogue, and telephone-based voice access. Sisl uses an event-based model of services that allows service providers to support interchangeable user interfaces (or add new ones) to a single consistent source of service logic and data.As part of a collaboration between research and development, Sisl is being used to prototype a new generation of call processing services for a Lucent Technologies switching product.

Speech-enabled services using TelePortal™ software and VoiceXML

TelePortal™ software, which resides on a speech-enabled telephony platform, brings the advantages of the World Wide Web to advanced speech recognition telephone services. In response to an incoming call, this software retrieves a dialogue specification document from a Web server, interprets it to collect input from a caller, and submits the input to a (possibly different) Web server, which processes the input and may continue the call by returning another dialogue specification document. The TelePortal architecture includes a browser (to retrieve and cache Web content), a set of interpreters (to process documents), and a set of platform interfaces (to allow the interpreters to control the speech and telephony resources of the host platform). Using the Web to retrieve dialogue documents and to process the input they collect creates a new business opportunity for network operators and third-party application developers. Interactive voice response (IVR) services, which may be made available from a standard wireline or wireless telephone, are easily programmed using the emerging Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML∗) standard. TelePortal software is being integrated into several Lucent platforms. We present examples of the new network IVR opportunities that this software provides for one of these — the platform of the intelligent network.