magicTalk Voice Gateway 1.5

The magicTalk Voice Gateway, billed as the "hub" of the vendor's voice application development platform, is a VoiceXML compliant server tool that coordinates Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech (TTS), and Web/enterprise applications in order to enable end users to access those applications using their standard telephones and voice commands. The open architecture of the server allows the organization to choose their own ASR/TTS platforms for use with the gateway. Nuance, IBM's ViaVoice, and AcuVoice were initially supported while support for Philips' and SpeechWorks' solutions was added with version 1.5 of the Gateway.

At the heart of the Voice Gateway is the Voice Dialog Engine (VDE) which manages the flow of VoiceXML applications. In addition to invoking standard telephony services for the incoming user phone call, the VDE listens for and captures user requests, passing them to the ASR and processing the results; and concatenates, and plays recorded audio responses and TTS generated content to the user.

Additional key features for developers inlude an interactive VoiceXML line debugger and an extension API, allowing developers to create and support their own proprietary VoiceXML tags.

In addition to the expanded voice recognition and TTS engine support for Philips SpeachPearl 2000 and SpeechWorks Speechify TTS, the latest release of the Gateway (1.5) includes a new Virtual Telephony Client which allows devlopers to create, test, and debug voice applications on their desktops.

The magicTalk Voice Gateway 1.5 is available now. Contact General Magic for further information.