What options are there for implementing a voice application?
A business has a continuum of solutions for building and deploying a voice application. These solutions range from pure do-it-yourself solutions to pure-outsourced solutions. With a do-it-yourself solution, a business hand crafts each technology layer of the voice application. First, it negotiates a carrier contract, then acquires and deploys the telephony hardware and software in an appropriate facility. Next, it evaluates and purchases the various components of the voice platform: the speech recognition engine, text-to-speech engine, voice application interpreter and so on. Finally, it builds the application plus the interfaces that integrate it with databases and other applications. A step up from the pure do-it-yourself solution is to outsource the telephony layer while building the voice platform and application integration layers. In this solution, the telephony-outsourcing vendor manages the telephony infrastructure, and provides an environment in which a business runs the other
