Voiceportal

Voice portals are the voice equivalent of Web Portals, giving access to information through spoken commands and voice responses. Ideally a voice portal could be an access point for any type of information, services, or transactions found on the Internet.

History

Voice portals have two distinct origins:

* The earliest form of voice portal is the telephone company Information service, staffed by live agents. With the advent of competition, particularly in Europe, the range of information provided by live agent portals has expanded far beyond telephone numbers to include a wide range of information including traffic, weather, lists of restaurants, where a movie is playing, lottery results and so on. Some of the premium services attempt to answer any question. The agent acts as an intermediary between the caller and the Internet.

* Internet-based, automated voice portals first appeared on the scene in 1999. Modern speech recognition technology from Speechworks and Nuance was combined with Internet technologies such as application servers, with database technologies of various kinds and with text-to-speech technologies to create a range of interactive voice services from movie times to stock trading.

Current Limitations

Voice is the most natural communication medium, but the information that can be provided is limited compared to visual media.

* Most Internet users try a search term, scan results, then adjust the search term to eliminate irrelevant results. They may take two or three quick iterations to get a list that they are confident will contain what they are looking for. The equivalent approach is not practical when results are spoken. It would take far too long.

* Speech recognition technology today matches what the caller says to a list of expected utterances, with an upper limit of perhaps 10,000 possibilities. The portal designers must therefore anticipate what people may ask for, and provide question-and-answer dialogs so the caller can zero in on a particular type of information. A sample dialog could be "Are you looking for a type of business, a movie, traffic...?" "Type of Business" "What type of business?" "Restaurant" "What type of restaurant?" "Chinese" "Near which street junction, neighborhood or landmark? ...". Although this approach works, and can be extremely useful for a caller from a mobile phone, it is far from the free-form "search for anything" approach possible with a web search engine.

Trends

Live-agent and Internet-based voice portals are converging, and the range of information they can provide is expanding.

Live-agent portals are introducing greater automation through speech recognition and text-to-speech technology, in many cases providing fully-automated service, while automated Internet-based portals are adding operator fallback in premium services. The live-agent portals, which used to rely entirely on pre-structured databases holding specific types of information are expanding into more free-form Internet access, while the Internet-based portals are adding pre-structured content to improve automation of the more common types of request.

Speech technology is starting to introduce Artificial Intelligence concepts that make it practicalto recognise a much broader range of utterances, learning from experience. This promises to make it practical to greatly improve speaker recognition rates and expand the range of information that can be provided by a voice portal.

Synonyms

*Voiceportal
*Voice-portal
*Vortal
*Vertical Portal

Technology Providers

A number of software companies are active in the Voice Portal area, including Tellme Networks and Quack.com - companies dedicated to providing voice-based access to Internet information to consumers. Quack.com launched its service in March 2000 and has since obtained the first overall voiceportal [http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6510417.html patent] [cite web|url=http://www.google.com/patents?id=Z1kOAAAAEBAJ&dq=Steven+Woods|title=System and method for voice access to internet-based information
accessdate=2008-03-13|year=2008] .
Quack.com was acquired by AOL in 2000 and relaunched as AOL By Phone later that year. Tellme Networks powers many large brand call centers and information services today.
Nuance, the dominant provider of speech recognition and text-to-speech technology is starting to deliver voice portal solutions. Other companies in this space include Apptera and Call Genie.Next to public Voice Portal services, a number of technology companies, like Avaya offer commercial enterprise grade Voice Portal products to be used by e.g. Internet or Mobility ISP's to serve their clients.

See also

* Mobile Search
* Mobile local searchGenesys has been no.1 position in the VXML standard based Voice Ports

Notes

External links

* [http://www-cs.ccny.cuny.edu/~esther/papers/DA_BOOK_CHAPTER.pdf Designing the Voice User Interface for Automated Directory Assistance. Amir Mané and Esther Levin]