Web & System Integration

Extend Your Web Application to the Telephone

The enterprise IT world has been taken by storm lately by the emergence of Web Services. Although we knew for years about the importance of modular distributed computing, only recently have development toolkits (.NET, J2EE, etc.) simplified the process of making business services re-usable, modular, decoupled and web-connected.

The Angel.com team has witnessed a rapidly-growing interest in interfacing IVR systems with web services. Many of our visionary customers have already deployed solutions that radically leverage web services infrastructure to extend a product's reach to the phone.

How is your IT organization using web services? Maybe you've only dabbled with the idea of using web services; maybe you're an early adopter and have deployed your first services already. You might even be a web services believer and all of your IT systems are accessible by these kinds of APIs today. Regardless of your level of web services usage, Angel.com makes it simple to integrate your existing web application with your IVR solution.

Here's the scoop. With Angel Transaction functionality, creating an IVR system driven by information accessible through SOAP or XML-RPC is no more complicated than making that information accessible through a website. A thin layer of web scripts can make the transformations necessary to present AngelXML, the language of IVR.

For example, let's assume your company maintains a Package Tracking web service: the WSDL defines a method (a port) that takes in a tracking number, and returns a status code. If you want to create an IVR system where callers can enter a tracking number and find out whether a package has been shipped, is in transit or has been delivered, this is what you would need:

A Voice Site with:
- A Greeting Page
- A Question Page, to enter and confirm the tracking number
- A Transaction Page, that calls on your thin 'glue' layer script.
- A Hang-up page, that says goodbye to the caller
A simple 'glue' script that takes the tracking number from Angel (in an HTTP Form) and composes a SOAP request. Then, it takes the SOAP response, extracts the status code, and returns it to Angel in plain text.

That's it! In a matter of 30 minutes you can voice-enable your web service, and make it easy for your customers (or partners, or employees) to get to the information they need through the phone.

The future holds a vast array of possibilities if you're involved in this field. Soon, you will be able to make any Voice Site directly talk to your web service natively, and eliminate the need for glue scripts. Stay tuned for announcements on this topic later in the year.

If you'd like to get more information on IVR for Web Services, we authored an article in the May Issue of Web Services Journal(listed below). It outlines how Outtask, one of our customers, built on top of their .NET web services investment to create a revolutionary Travel & Expense portal that combines the best of the web and the phone.

If you have a web services IVR project in mind, we'd love to talk to you! Give us a call at 888-692-6435 and say "Developer Hotline".

Sam Aparicio