Gateway Components

Voicent Gateway contains five major components:

1. Telephony Engine
2. Speech Engine
3. VoiceXML Interpreter
4. Interface Module
5. Web Server (optional)

The telephony engine controls and interacts with telephony hardware. For example, it answers the phone, initiates a outbound call, and plays audio over the phone line, etc.

The speech engine converts text to speech and recognizes speech commands. Current release only supports Microsoft speech engine.

The VoiceXML interpreter parses VoiceXML files and carries out instructions in these files.

The interface module interacts with the Gateway client applications.

An open source web server (Tomcat) is integrated with Voicent Gateway. It is the default place to install applications. This is an optional components.

Applications are developed at a higher level

The functionality of each component and their interactions are complicated, but the complexity is hidden from applications. To have an interactive telephony application, all you have to do is provide a set of VoiceXML files, possibly dynamically generated, to Voicent Gateway. The gateway takes care of the rest. The following figure illustrates the main components involved.

Figure 1. Application and Gateway