OptimTalk Technology facilitates creation of a large variety of applications and solutions. Some of them are presented below.

Thanks to OptimTalk Technology, the applications can offer excellent flexibility and features that have not been available before along with reducing the time and costs needed for building such applications. Once developed, the applications can be easily modified, making it possible to react flexibly on changing customer requirements.

The most usual application areas include:

1. Telephone information and reservation lines
2. Call center solutions
3. Automated switchboard operators
4. Automation of emergency situation handling
5. Automated voice announcement and notification systems
6. Automated telephone survey system
7. Remote device monitoring and control over phone
8. Unified messaging and user collaboration systems,
9. Customer support system enhancement
10. Speech interface for desktop applications
11. Multimodal applications
12. Thin client applications
13. Data collection
14. Research

Telephone information and reservation lines

OptimTalk Technology provides you with all you need for building various information and reservation lines accessible via phone, including air plain ticket reservation, hotel and car reservation, product information and many more.

The call control (e.g. rules for accepting incoming calls and connecting the customer to the automated voice system) can be easily described using the CCXML language. The interaction with the customer can be specified using the VoiceXML language.

Unlike the previous generation IVR systems, the VoiceXML based systems make it possible to use not only DTMF (touch tone) navigation using menus and playback of pre-recorded audio clips, but also speech recognition for navigation using speech and text-to-speech for flexible dynamically generated answers.

OptimTalk Technology leaves you the freedom of choice with respect to the speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies as well as telephony infrastructure you wish to use for your system.

Call center solutions

OptimTalk Technology is an optimal technology for building solutions for call centers or enhancing your existing solutions with new capabilities. Thanks to CCXML and VoiceXML support, creation of a large scale of advanced features required by modern call centers becomes an easy task.

With OptimTalk Technology, you can easily produce solutions featuring automatic call distribution (ACD) including skill-based routing, call blending, blind and conference call transfers, auto-attendants, interactive voice response applications for automatic handling of customer's requests and more.

OptimTalk Technology also makes it possible to communicate with external applications from within VoiceXML and CCXML scripts, which can be used e.g. to display screen-pops on agents' screens with caller information, store call-related information into a database, or interface with your existing call center solutions.

Automated switchboard operators

OptimTalk Technology provides rich functionality suitable for building automated switchboard operators operating private branch exchange (PBX) to relay incoming, outgoing and interoffice calls. Current speech recognition technology is able to recognize reliably lists of names counting tens of thousands items. Moreover, using OptimTalk Technology, the system is able to start conversation with the caller to clarify ambiguous information.

An automated switchboard operator based on OptimTalk Technology may also handle other clerical duties, such as supplying information and taking messages. By interconnecting the automated switchboard operator with the internal information system containing information about presence or absence of all employees, the system can automatically decide whether to transfer the caller to the office phone, mobile phone or take a message instead.

Automation of emergency situation handling

Automation may play a critical role in handling of emergency situations, such as fires, dangerous chemical leaks, or other security incidents in objects and areas. The person reporting the problem should perform several tasks in a very short time according to an emergency plan, including several phone calls. Performance of all the tasks is error-prone due to the high stress factor. OptimTalk Technology can be an optimal solution in these situation since it is able to work absolutely reliably, perform all the phone calls in parallel and automatically compile a report for the person who is dealing with other tasks in the meantime.

This can spare quite a lot of time, which can be the key factor for rescuing lives or reducing economic losses. The reliable delivery of the automated messages can be ensured by requiring the receiving person to enter a code using telephone touch keys.

Automated voice announcement and notification systems

OptimTalk Technology represents a modern technology for various voice annunciation and notification systems. Using OptimTalk Technology, connecting the sound output to a network of loudspeakers in a factory, railway station, airport or another public place is as simple as connecting it to a phone line. Emergency alerts can be broadcasted to the public as well as announcements or information messages. Using the phone, community events can be announced to interested individuals.

Automated telephone survey systems

OptimTalk Technology is a powerful technology for building automated telephone survey software. Thanks to the use of text-to-speech technology, you can customize the survey questions for each of your survey participants according to the information in your database. The responses can be given using DTMF (touchtones), spoken phrases or they can be simply recorded for further processing. Furthermore, you can give your survey participants the option to record a voice message, hear additional information or even to to talk with a representative.

Remote device monitoring and control over phone

The ability of OptimTalk Technology to communicate with external applications from within VoiceXML and CCXML scripts makes it a suitable technology for building applications for remote device monitoring and control over phone. Such applications include e.g. remote sensor data reading and setting or remote server reboot.

OptimTalk Technology provides you with all you need for calling to the application, presenting information read from the sensor using text-to-speech technology and setting the sensor using spoken commands or touchtones.

Unified messaging and user collaboration systems

OptimTalk Technology can be used as a flexible component for voice and telephony related operations within a unified messaging system (a unified messaging system integrates voice mail, e-mail and fax services into a single interface accessible from your PC as well as phone, PDA or other devices) or user collaboration systems. Thanks to the unique ability of OptimTalk Technology to communicate with external applications from within VoiceXML and CCXML scripts, it can be seamlessly integrated with other components of the system.

OptimTalk Technology can significantly facilitate several tasks in this area, such as playback and recording of voice messages over the phone, reading emails over the phone using text-to-speech, automated notification about incoming emails and upcoming meetings, automated conference call set up, etc.

Customer support system enhancement

OptimTalk Technology can be used for enhancing customer support systems. Having full and accurate information about the customer who is currently calling is an important aspect of a successful business. Based on the incoming call number or upon entering customer identification number (using a simple VoiceXML based dialog), OptimTalk Technology can access the database of your customers and display required information on the screen before the customer is connected.

Speech interface for desktop applications

OptimTalk Technology can be used for building speech interfaces for desktop applications. The spoken commands are described in VoiceXML which allows for easy and quick changes in the speech interface. The connection between the speech interface and the application is possible thanks to the OptimTalk Technology feature that makes it possible to communicate with external applications from within VoiceXML scripts.

Multimodal applications

OptimTalk Technology can serve as a powerful base for building multimodal applications, i.e. applications that use several input/output channels for communication with the user. Typical example is a combination of speech and graphical user interface.

Thin client applications

Thanks to the flexible architecture of OptimTalk Technology, it can be exploited for building advanced speech applications on thin clients, i.e. devices that do not have enough processing power to run the whole system. The thin client might be used only for gathering user's input and presenting output to the user, while the rest of the system will run on a server. The communication between the client and the server will be realized via wireless network.

Data collection

Collection of data about the system behavior and their subsequent evaluation is one of the basic methods for improvement of speech based interfaces. For systems based on OptimTalk Technology the data collection is an easy task. The logging capabilities of VoiceXML and CCXML languages are further supported by means provided by the technology itself.

Research

Research in the field of human language technologies often involves building an experimental dialog system used for evaluation of algorithms and various experiments. A significant amount of time is needed to create such a system. Using OptimTalk Technology significantly reduces the time needed for this task.

Thanks to its highly modular and open architecture, every part of OptimTalk Technology can be replaced or extended. In the same time, it is possible to modify only the parts of the system that are relevant for the particular research activity.