New IBM Software Tool Aids Voice-Enabled e-business

SOMERS, N.Y, August 8, 2001-- IBM today introduced WebSphereŽ Voice Toolkit, software that enables developers with minimal voice-recognition experience to create speech-enabled e-business applications accessible by telephone and a variety of other mobile devices. Now available in beta version, WebSphere Voice Toolkit is the latest in IBM's portfolio of products that are helping enterprises voice-enable their applications and e-business infrastructure.

IBM WebSphere Voice Toolkit supports the open standard VoiceXML so developers no longer need specialized voice technology skills and can leverage existing Web infrastructure to provide voice access to information on Web sites, databases and corporate intranets. IBM is one of the original drivers of VoiceXML, which gives developers a common way to build software for voice-enabled mobile e-business.

IBM WebSphere Voice Toolkit contains building blocks, such as VoiceXML program editors, grammar editors, pronunciation builders and VoiceXML Reuseable Dialog Components, that speed development of voice applications and allow programmers to build voice-enabled applications without being familiar with low-level details of voice programming, such as grammars and phonetics.

"No longer do you need a team of rocket scientists to build a voice application," said Sunil Soares, product management director, IBM Voice Systems. "IBM recognizes that voice is part of a broader e-business infrastructure, which is why the Websphere Voice Toolkit allows the voice front end to be easily integrated with the back end. This means, for example, that a developer can seamlessly link a phone-based, voice-enabled stock quote or transaction service with middleware that it is already running on."

"The voice marketplace has matured to the point where call centers and carriers want application solutions, not just technology," said Mark Plakias, SVP Voice & Wireless Commerce at The Kelsey Group. "This IBM announcement is a wake-up call to the applications developer community, to say that they can generate industry-standard well-formed VoiceXML using familiar drag-and-drop tools that they have been using for Java and the widely-deployed WebSphere application server."

IBM WebSphere Voice Toolkit is part of IBM's WebSphere Voice Server product line that uses industry-standard technology such as VoiceXML and Java to tie together speech recognition, telephony and the Web for developing and deploying voice-enabled applications. WebSphere Voice Server is available for IBM DirectTalk, Cisco's Voice-over-IP gateways, and the Dialogic voice portal platform. IBM's WebSphere family is Internet infrastructure software, or middleware, that can enable businesses to host, run and integrate e-business applications. With the introduction of WebSphere Voice Server in 2000, WebSphere became the first application server to offer integrated voice support.

The beta of WebSphere Voice Toolkit is available as a free download through IBM's alphaWorks Web site (www.ibm.com/alphaworks ) or at www.ibm.com/software/speech . It will be generally available in the fall.

IBM WebSphere Voice Toolkit includes:

An integrated development environment (IDE) - runs on the desktop and provides the ability to address the elements required to create a speech application

A VoiceXML editor - provides syntax checking and content assistance Grammar editor - enables syntax checking and content assistance

A pronunciation builder - generates a pronunciation from text as well as the ability to manually create pronunciations

An audio recorder - allows the creation of audio files from spoken text and provides the means to play a previously-recorded audio file

VoiceXML Reusable Dialog Components - pre-written VoiceXML code to use as building blocks for application functions such as names, addresses, URLs, and credit card information.

Requirements for Beta Version:

IBM WebSphere Voice Toolkit 1.0 requires the following hardware and software:

System that supports Windows 2000 operating system Minimum 300MB disk space for install code

Optional hardware to test newly-developed application code: Quality microphone; soundcard/speakers supported by the test environment

Software to test newly-developed application code: WebSphere Voice

Server 1.5 SDK or another development environment that will support