Natural Language Speech Recognition (NLSR) feature

Type of feature

Natural language speech recognition (NLSR) is a licensed feature. You must have WebLM licenses to use this feature.

About the natural language speech recognition feature

NLSR provides a natural conversational interface with IVR systems. Not only can NLSR be used to recognize particular words and phrases, it can also interpret and assign meaning to the speech it recognizes.

For example, under the more basic forms of speech recognition, a caller can respond only to specific prompts, such as "Say `one' if you want information about..." or "Say `yes' if this is correct." NLSR enables you to write applications that ask the caller more open-ended questions, such as a banking application that presents the caller with a list of options and then asks "What would you like to do?" Then, when the caller responds "I'd like to know the balance of my checking account, please," the system can recognize what kind of information the caller is asking for (the balance in a checking account ) and can automatically direct the call to a new prompt that would ask for the checking account number. This technology provides a more natural way of interacting with callers.

It is worth noting that NLSR is also able to take into account grammatical structures. This allows it, for instance, to recognize and deal appropriately with differences in statements like the following caller responses:

"I would like to fly from Chicago to LAX."
"I need to get from LAX to Chicago."

NLSR is also capable of understanding natural numbers ("seventy-six" instead of "seven six"), natural dates ("July 26th" instead of "zero seven two six") and natural currency ("25 dollars" instead of "two five zero zero").

Hardware requirements

NLSR requires the following hardware:

• Digital telephony board (not required for use with Voice over IP feature).
• LAN (installed by customer) with the following characteristics:
  • TCP/IP PCI Ethernet network operating at a speed of 100 Mbps
  • LAN segment dedicated for all Avaya IR traffic

In addition to these requirements, you must also have one or more remote NLSR servers, depending on the NLSR engine requirements. Hardware requirements for these NLSR servers are provided by the NLSR engine vendor.

Software requirements

The NLSR feature requires the following software:

• Speech Proxy package
• Speech Proxy - Speech Recognition package
• If using SpeechWorks NLSR engine, SpeechWorks ASR package
• NLSR engine software (provided by the NLSR engine vendor and installed on remote NLSR server)
• An IVR application developed using IVR Designer (for either VXML or TAS) or written directly in VXML.

Setup requirements

To set up the NLSR feature:

1. Verify that you have all the required installation software and hardware set up properly.
2. Take note of the capacity of the speech servers you will be using.
3. Verify that the network interface card (NIC) is installed on the Avaya IR platform.
4. Install the NLSR software packages.

   Note:
   WebLM licenses for this feature should be generated on the Avaya IR system.

5. Administer the NLSR feature using Web Administration (Feature Packages > Speech and DPR Administration > Administration).
6. Verify that connections between the Avaya IR platform and any NLSR servers are established.

Application development considerations for TAS applications

A prerequisite to creating and deploying TAS applications for NLSR is creating the required NLSR grammars. Check with your NLSR vendor for the specifics on how to create and install the required grammars. In addition to creating the actual NLSR grammars, you must also create stub grammars for each NLSR grammar you intend to use in your application.

In a typical NLSR application, external functions are used to:

• Allocate NLSR resources on the remote NLSR server (allocPROXY) and release them when the application is finished with them (deallocPROXY)
• Exchange command and response strings with the NLSR server (requestPROXY)

Other proxy external functions are used for debugging purposes to:

• Get data collection files for analysis (getdcPROXY)
• Remove data collection files when they are no longer needed (rmdcPROXY)

With these external functions, you can incorporate natural language speech recognition functionality into your IVR Designer applications.

Application development considerations for VXML applications

Follow the specifications and limitations described in Using VoiceXML to create and deploy VXML applications for NLSR.

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