Outbound IVR monitoring application

Posted on February 11, 2009 | By Voicent

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.

Posted in IVR Developer, Outbound IVR |

Voice Recorded Survey

Posted on February 5, 2009 | By Voicent

can you do a voice recorded survey that captures a wav and emails me it on the voice broadcasting system

for example for my interviews-”hi this is abc company you filled out our online application for the sales job we are hiring for, this will record your voice and send us your voicerecorded interview. tell me about your past sales experience and then press 1 for the next question…..\”we ask a few questions and then at the end the voice interview is emailed to me

Yes, you first use Voicent IVR Studio to design your survey and response, then select the designed survey application for Voicent BroadcastByPhone program.

We have a sample Broadcast a multi-question survey. The only difference is that the sample captures the touch tone key responses. To capture voice responses, simply replace the Choice Element in the IVR callflow to Recording Element.

To send the voice recording as an email, please see IVR sample: Voicemail to Email. This sample requires you to enter your SMTP email server and account information by modifying the included Java program. This might be a little challenging if you do not have IT background. But the good news is that for the upcoming release (6.4), the email action will be built-in, so it will be much easier to send an email from an IVR application.

Posted in IVR Usage |

Run Program unrecognized option

Posted on February 2, 2009 | By Voicent

I am have a “Run Program” Action set up in a Prompt Element that encounters errors no matter which way I set it up

in the Gateway output.log, I can see where the command is set perfectly, but it is then followed by an error :

Could not create the Java virtual machine

This program works correctly when executed from a command line, or from a .bat file using the same exact command syntax

Run Program: java.exe -classpath C:\\JavaSQL\\sqljdbc_1.2\\enu\\sqljdbc.jar;c:\\javatc\\punch_in voicent.timecardin.MyDbPunchIN 4636012

Could not create the Java virtual machine.
Unrecognized option: -classpath C:\\JavaSQL\\sqljdbc_1.2\\enu\\sqljdbc.jar;c:\\javatc\\punch_in voicent.timecardin.MyDbPunchIN

I looked at the information on your web site and confirmed I entered everything as documented.

The Run Program fields I set up are
Program: java.exe
with 2 Arguments
‘-classpath C:\\JavaSQL\\sqljdbc_1.2\\enu\\sqljdbc.jar;c:\\javatc\\punch_in voicent.timecardin.MyDbPunchIN\’
account_number (passed as a variable)

What do I need to do differently in IVR Studio to make this work. As I mentioned above, it works fine from a command prompt and a .bat file, but not from Studio

The program arguments are prepared in a array and sent to Runtime.exec for execution, so you need to setup 4 arguments in the action.

‘-classpath’
‘C:\\JavaSQL\\sqljdbc_1.2\\enu\\sqljdbc.jar;c:\\javatc\\punch_in’
‘voicent.timecardin.MyDbPunchIN’
account_number

I changed it to 4 arguments and it still didn’t work. there is one difference in the error, besides the original “Java virtual machine” error, it’s also logging “Unrecognized option” here’s the 4 lines from the log file after making the change you suggested

Run Program: java.exe -classpath
C:\JavaSQL\sqljdbc_1.2\enu\sqljdbc.jar;c:\javatc\punch_in
voicent.timecardin.MyDbPunchIN 4636012

Could not create the Java virtual machine.
Unrecognized option: -classpath C:\JavaSQL\sqljdbc_1.2\enu\sqljdbc.jar;c:\javatc\punch_in

the text from “”Run Program:” is perfect and works from the command prompt

I also tried several variations of breaking up the arguments and those didn’t work either.

It should work. We tried to run ‘java.exe -version’.

Here is what we entered in the action:

Program: java.exe

args:

‘-classpath’
‘C:\\Program Files\\Voicent\\Gateway\\lib\\ant.jar’
‘-version’

Please make sure your have double backslashes.

The jar is not used. But the program runs from the gateway and shows the following in the log files:

Exec form item: runjava

Run Program: java.exe -classpath C:\\Program Files\\Voicent\\Gateway\\lib\\ant.jar -version

FLUSH
java version “1.6.0_07″
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_07-b06)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 10.0-b23, mixed mode, sharing)

IT WORKS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
doubling up the backslashes did the trick !

Posted in IVR Usage |