Q. What are the existing call processing Systems?
 It's IVR - There are hundreds of vendors providing IVR systems around the world and the technology is at least 10 years old.

Q. What can I you do with IVR systems?
 Build DTMF applications with menu options and capability to deliver minimum information. Also they are built with traditional call control and CTI features.

Q. Where is IVR used?
 Mostly in call centers or to automate the routine transaction processing. There are around 140,000 call centers in US and Canada. 

Q. What is that AscenTel™ can do?
 AscenTel™ removes all the limitations of IVR. You are no more limited with menu options. AscenTel™ is complete platform for developing and launching voice applications.

Also since it uses VoiceXML for application development it uses your existing web infrastructure and the turn around time to develop the telephony application is dramatically less as compared to IVR application development. Another important fact is that AscenTel™ allows you to host the voice applications in a network environment. This means that the telephony servers could be anywhere and the voice applications could be anywhere else on the network.

Another important point is that, earlier PBX vendors supplied the IVR systems along with their setup and voice-processing cards were not very common. Dialogic and NMS and few other companies came up with open standard voice processing cards and technologies. This helped us to develop AscenTel™, which has the continuous speech recognition capability and many other unique telephony features.

Q. Are you looking at replacing IVR systems around the world?
No, not at all, we believe that the limitation of IVR has restricted it to be used mostly under call center environment. Information that can be processed with IVR application was something, which was limited to few menu options. For example think about listing stock quotes for 100,000 companies with menu options. With voice applications you can just speak company name and get the quote for today in no time. It would have been impossible to develop this type of an application with menu options. Another example is the application for locating a service in certain city. How do you list 100,000 cities for him to choose?

The above example says there will be hundreds of new services that can be provided over telephone which was really impossible two years before and it is possible today with advancement in speech recognition technology. This brings in thousands of business opportunity for Ascent. The market is just ready to accept voice based telephone applications as a new communication channel to their customers.

Kelsey group predicts $41 billion spending by 2005 for the services around voice. This indicates that there will be hundreds of companies launching the voice systems in the near future.

Q. There are many new IVR systems with speech recognition capability, how do you think you are different from them?
 There are many reasons why VoiceXML based application development is many times faster and easier than doing the same on an IVR with speech recognition.

 - Developing IVR system would need knowledge on complex telephony and speech
   technology. 
 - You would also need to integrate with complex middleware technology to do access
   information from remote databases and systems. There are hundreds of web-based
   technologies, which were developed during last few years. 
 - VoiceXML based application development can use most of the existing web technologies.
 - Application developer would need proprietary technical skills to develop voice application
   and turn around time would be many times more than doing the same with VoiceXML
   based application development environment. The complexities speech and telephony
   technology would be totally isolated from the developer today.