That unifying voice

WEBLEY SYSTEMS IS a communications company, headquartered in Deerfield, Ill., that integrates office phone, home phone, cell, fax, e-mail, and other services from one interface. As CTO, Alex Kurganov is principal architect of Webley’s technology platform. The service offers groups of users, virtual companies, or companies that are located in various places a single front end. InfoWorld spoke with Kurganov about running a unified communications system.

One issue that seems to plague the notion of unified communications is that you can glue everything together and connect it all, but people seem to have trouble providing a flexible UI that can track presence from device to device and adjust to the UI of the different devices.

You’re absolutely right, but we’re not doing [it] the way the industry is doing. … And what we understand is exactly what you’re saying, that user interface [is] quintessential. That’s why we started with natural speech recognition technology developing these interfaces. And we basically say that without that, you cannot expect regular users to cope with the complexity [of] features and options. And that’s why all this complexity is hidden behind the very friendly user interface and the very powerful natural speech interface. So you really don’t have to understand how it works internally, you just basically say commands like — follow me here. And if you call from an IP device, it’ll put your IP address into Follow Me destination and it will find you there. Or you can say — transfer my calls to … Blast my calls to my office phone and my mobile phone. You can say these phrases. You don’t have to remember a single command.

So the intelligence isn’t so much dependent upon my understanding of the UI as much as it that the intelligence is embedded in the network.

Exactly. So all you need to say is what you want to do, and that’s why you don’t have to read a single manual. When you get on the phone, you got a tutorial that tells you what to say [and] how to say something. If you forget, you time-out and it plays you what you can say. And then it gives you suggestions as you start using the system, it will give you more powerful commands.

So the intelligence is not in the phone, it’s in the network. And you’re applying the same model now to unified communications using data.

But we work with different devices. Remember, I mentioned that various devices have various intelligence. If we have a dumb device … we provide you the most rich interface that we can through natural speech. Now if you have a smarter device, like SIP-Phone, you could do different things. If you have even smarter device, like a PDA with voice capabilities, like Pocket PC, we could do even better. Because we’re not going to force you to use speech recognition on PDA because you have these wonderful point-and-click capabilities. But depending on the situation, you may choose to use speech when, for example, you drive or when it’s dark. We’ll do multiple modality.

So what does the advent of technologies such as Web services and that whole extension of the XML architecture mean for a company like yours?

It means that we can bring into this communication world, which is a necessity for anyone, all the corporate back end, because it’s all exposed through XML and we are all exposed through XML and SOAP. … And XML is just — you know, they publish their schema and we publish our schema, and we basically then allow them to create through speech — through our Web interface and speech interface — we allow them to create custom system for handling their internal corporate.

Source: www.infoworld.com