Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--iMessaging Boosts Support for Spanish in Interactive Voice System

iMessaging Systems has improved its Spanish language support in iVoice, an interactive voice response system for OS/400 applications. With iVoice 2.03, due out this week, the company has expanded the number of voice options for dynamic DB2/400 text-to-speech conversion, including a new voice selection named "Javier," which features a male voice speaking the Mexican dialect of Spanish. This release of iVoice now also supports Spanish for the first time with its automated speech-recognition capability.

Speaking with an OS/400 server may not seem like a natural way to interface with the computer. But for some types of customer facing applications, the good old telephone serves as a very good replacement for the keyboard and screen, allowing people to listen to prompts--either pre-recorded or delivered dynamically--and to respond appropriately with voice or keypad commands. That's exactly what iVoice is designed to do.

With Version 2.03, iMessaging has upgraded the iVoice package to use the latest version of the Speechify engine, from iMessaging's partner SpeechWorks, which the company says renders voices more clearly and in a higher quality. The new Speechify engine also gives users more choices when it comes to picking the voice that will represent their company. Companies can choose either male or female voices, in either English or Spanish.

In addition to "speaking" DB2/400 data, iVoice can "listen" to callers and respond to their commands, thanks to its speech-recognition technology.

Rich Ollari, iMessaging's marketing manager, says the new release will help users provide a more human-like experience with their customers. "With 2.03.0, I believe people will be very surprised at just how far speech recognition and speech synthesis, and therefore the callers' interactive experience, have progressed."

Improvements iMessaging has made to the iVoice interface that people use when they're recording messages should also boost the product's Spanish support. The company says that the improvements make the software easier to use, it gives users the capability to view prompts in a sorted format, and it also lets them establish a place-keeper that remembers the language and the last prompt used during the previous recording session.

The iVoice 2.03 also includes new function key support that gives the software the capability to recognize certain special keywords during speech-recognition operations. For example, iVoice can be configured to recognize the keyword "agent" during a speech recognition session, which will transfer the caller immediately to a live agent. Up to 10 function keys or keywords can be defined.

Other new features include alphanumeric recognition for applications requiring numbers that include both digits and alphabetic characters, as well as enhancements to the iVoice runtime program that should improve security and provide more flexibility and control when the OS/400 server is not available.

The iVoice system is a combination of hardware and software that lets developers build a telephone interface into OS/400 applications written in RPG or COBOL. It includes a Windows-based controller that houses the voice software, recording hardware, and telephone ports, and an OS/400 component that includes the iVoice APIs that programmers insert into OS/400 applications, as program or procedure calls, in order to voice-enable the applications. The company says that its "host-controlled" programming technique requires a minimum of new skills.