New York, New York, August 1, 2005 - Openstream announced today that it has contributed speech components for stock market applications to the Apache Foundation.Companies wanting to develop stock or trading applications the North American Stock Exchanges can use these Reuseable Dialogue Components within the IBM-Apache RDC framework.
The RDC initiative, led by IBM and its partners drives the speech and voice application business from its proprietary, vertical roots into the horizontal world of standards-based development. Speech components, called RDCs or Reusable Dialog Components, handle basic functions such as recognizing and responding to company names in brokerage and trading applications, dates or currencies, for example. Open source and open standards are two of the major new waves sweeping through the world of voice and speech.
As the speech industry continues to donate RDCs to Apache, the underlying RDC initiative is building momentum. The demonstration of an active community around RDCs has led the Apache Jakarta project to vote to move RDCs from sandbox status to supported project status. This is a significant step toward mainstream adoption and further proof that the ecosystem sees industry value in moving in this direction. These open source initiatives help the speech industry achieve easier, faster, cheaper creation and deployment of speech applications leading to reduced cost and improved customer service.
In September of 2004, at the 10th annual SpeechTEK conference in New York, IBM announced the Reusable Dialog Component (RDC) initiative wherein IBM, supported by its business partners including Openstream, contributed Reusable Dialog Components to the open-source community via Apache and Eclipse. Based on Java, with tools built on Eclipse, the initiative gives speech developers the benefits of open standards that mainstream developers have been enjoying. By moving from proprietary components and tools to those based on open standards, speech developers benefit by being able to work with components from different vendors - allowing them to build higher value applications faster. Businesses can speech-enable existing applications more efficiently - since they work on the same infrastructure as other applications. The initiative takes speech technology out of its current silos into the arena of mainstream Web developers, who can use their skills and resources to take on more of the development work to speech-enable new and existing applications in an environment they're already familiar with.
Openstream announced support for IBM's RDC donations to the open source community, including integrating RDC capability into Openstream's Smart Messaging Platform, last Fall. Openstream has been shipping the Smart Messaging Platform incorporating standards-based components including many from IBM and Apache.
Originally developed by IBM Research, RDCs are Java Server Page (JSP) tags that enable dynamic development of voice applications. JSPs that incorporate RDC tags automatically generate W3C VoiceXML at runtime that can execute on any VoiceXML compliant platform. Speech dialogs built using RDCs will work together, regardless of the vendor that created them. Openstream's contributed RDC tags are available through the Apache Software Foundation ( www.apache.org ).
IBM Vice President Contact Center Solutions, IBM Software Group , Bruce Morse said, "IBM is enthused to see that the open source community is continuing to extend RDCs. The industry will benefit by building out RDCs to handle more ways of expressing common terms."
"This initiative will help converge the Voice and Web programming models by combining the J2EE and VoiceXML technologies together, enabling the large Web developer community to easily add speech to their Web applications" says, Raj Tumuluri, President & CEO of Openstream, Inc.
In the standards arena, Openstream supports the XHTML+Voice (X+V), approach that combines existing W3C recommendations as a way of speech enabling Web sites and Web based services to provide multimodal access. For implementation, Openstream adds extensions and plug-ins for its development environment, Smart Messaging Platform and others.
Openstream is also a proponent of Service Oriented Architectures, recognizing the need for horizontal distribution of customer information across the enterprise through middleware. SOAs let enterprises reduce the amount of time a customer is on the phone, reduce errors being made , and in turn reduce contact center volume overall, since data across the enterprise is more consistent and accurate. Taking a modular approach in the reuse and deployment of standardized services interfaces for applications and resources, contact centers can mix and match, add or remove business processes and infrastructure as needed, in what IBM calls the On Demand environment, giving them the ability to reuse and more easily deploy assets through an SOA in order to respond quickly to market changes.
Openstream is a leading provider of secure mobile Internet infrastructure platform and applications. Openstream offers Enterprises, Service Providers and SMB Financial Institutions worldwide a suite of cost-saving and brand-loyalty-enhancing mobile applications that implement personalized services in a multi-modal environment, using wireless and speech technologies. Openstream's Smart Messaging Platform (SMP) mobilizes businesses and increases productivity by mobile-enabling business critical data for customers and employees. With SMP the users will be Informed, In Touch and In Control... always! Additional information about Openstream's products and solutions can be found at www.openstream.com .
Openstream and Delivering Intelligence are trademarks of Openstream, Inc.
The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits contributors' potential legal exposure. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products. For more information on the Apache Software Foundation, please see www.apache.org .
IBM is the world's largest information technology company with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key business partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable companies to take full advantage of the on demand era. Please visit www.ibm.com on the World Wide Web.
|
