With its announcement Monday of an upgrade to its voice platform, Edify is laying out a new architecture for enterprises deploying speech applications.
The Santa Clara, Calif., company said it plans to unbundle the core voice application server and voice browser from its Voice Interaction Platform when Version 9.0 is released in September.
The move to offer the platform in components is part of Edifys effort to give customers more options for deploying speech applications, said Marie Jackson, vice president of marketing at Edify Corp.
The company, known for offering traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, wants to help more of its customer migrate to speech-enabled applications from traditional systems that use dial tone for automation.
“Were trying to bridge the gaps of the old-school IVR vendors and the new breed of vendors that are voice XML browsers,” said Ken Waln, chief technology officer at Edify.
The two major components Edify will offer with its Voice Interaction Platform 9.0 are the Edify Voice Application Server—a Windows-based server for running speech applications—and the Edify Voice Browser, which also will include support for VOIP (voice over IP) as well as traditional PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).
Both support VoiceXML 2.0, meaning that customers will be able to use other vendors voice application servers or voice browsers that support the VoiceXML standard, Waln said.
“Its really an architectural release,” Waln said. “For now, its laying the foundation of a new version of the architecture with components split out to better meet the needs of partners and of customers.”
Edify has not released pricing for the new version of its Voice Interaction Platform, expected to be available in early September, Jackson said.
To support speech recognition, the Edify platform works with the major speech-recognition engines and text-to-speech engines from Nuance Communications Inc. and ScanSoft Inc., Edify officials said.
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