Outbound IVR monitoring application

I just got off the phone after speaking with sales. I am very interested in using your Voicent GW product to monitor our phone lines.

We currently have monitoring and alerting capabilities for temperature, web site response, server performance statistics etc. We have the technical staff to develop custom applications. We extensively use Open Source software and development environments (gcc, Perl, PHP, etc.)

We have a couple hundred phone numbers that require monitoring to ensure their availability. From reading your product literature, we feel we could use your software via Skype to dial the numbers to be monitored and acquire the result.

Thank you for your interests in Voicent products. Voicent products have been used by many customers for monitoring and notification, such as testing an IVR system. The architecture of Voicent gateway is based on VoiceXML, a W3C open standard. All Voicent products provides HTTP interface, so they should fit into your environment nicely. Actually, we have Apache Tomcat web server embedded in the gateway.

What results are possible? (Busy, Dead Air, Disconnected number, milliwatt tone, specific DTMF response, Speech to Text, etc.) What OS platforms do you support? What development environments are required? (most important question!)

The basic call results, such as busy tone, no answer that are returned by Skype, are available through the Voicent call status interface.

For other results, such as dead air, specific DTMF tone responses, are possible to get but you must create your own outbound IVR application using Voicent gateway or IVR Studio. For example, to detect dead air, you need to test silence in the incoming audio stream. One way to do that through Voicent is to record the audio to a file, and run your own silence detection for the audio file.

Voicent software can be run on Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista

In terms of development environment, there are two parts: one is the interface for making phone calls, and the other is the actual IVR application.

For the interface part, you can use any programming language, such as PHP, Perl, C++ etc, as long as the language has HTTP client interface.

For the IVR application, you need an web application that supplies VoiceXML code. Most customers use Voicent IVR Studio to create their application since the GUI tool is tightly integrated with the gateway. The IVR application can call any Java method, execute SQL statement, and run external programs.

To be honest, I am a little confused after visiting your web site. It shows many different ways to access the functionality of your SW (Perl, PHP, etc.)

What are the tradeoffs (from most functionality to least functinality) of the interfacing choices? (example: HTTP has least functionality, Perl has more, C++ has most functional choices) If I am on the right track so far, which interface methods provide the functionality to monitor the above mentioned results?

Thank you for your time.

Yes, it is a little overwhelming with all the interfaces. But as we explained above, the interface part for making calls are not that important. It simply submits a call requests to the gateway and fetches the call result.

For the IVR application, we recommend you start with the IVR Studio. To understand more about the gateway, take a look at the gateway tutorial for inbound and outbound applications.