Voice Development FAQ 

Some frequently asked questions about voice-enabled application development and the answers to them follow.

What Solutions Can Be Implemented?

You use SAP NetWeaver Voice to develop applications that allow customers and employees to interact with SAP or non-SAP solutions. These solutions can be internal to or external from your organization.

Practical examples of voice-enabled applications include:

·        Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

¡        Travelers call to book a flight or to check departure times.

¡        Customers dial in to create an order or to check its status.

¡        Product users call for support.

¡        Utility clients use the telephone to report their meter readings.

·        Remote User (RU) Services

○       Field technicians dial in to report a malfunction.

○       Truck drivers call to update their location or travel status.

●      Employee Self-Service (ESS)

¡        Employees call in at work to report their absence.

○       System users reset a password by telephone.

What Are the Advantages?

Some major benefits of a voice-enabled application include:

●      Providing system access via a telephone to anyone anywhere at anytime

●      Making business transactions easy to use

●      Eliminating paper-based transactions

●      Limiting dependency on mobile devices, computers, and Internet access

●      Saving costs by automating telephone processes

●      Expanding your business by reaching users on a larger scale

●      Leveraging the easy-to-use Visual Composer development environment

What Are the Key Capabilities?

Some key NetWeaver Voice capabilities include:

·        Full integration with SAP NetWeaver

·        Graphical application modeling using Visual Composer (Voice Kit)

·        Voice-enabled access to business transactions using Enterprise Services, Remote Function Call (RFC), or BAPI

·        Complete software lifecycle (administering, deploying, logging, and monitoring) for voice applications

·        Detailed reporting through Business Information Warehouse (BI) (optional)

·        Investment protection in ERP and SAP Business Suite

What Systems Do You Need?

The development system is  the Visual Composer Voice Kit. The Voice Kit extends the capabilities of the Visual Composer for voice-enabled application modeling. It provides a complete set of modeling tools for back-end access, data manipulations, dialog elements, and dialog flow. The Voice Kit provides a complete and codeless implementation of a fully interactive voice application.

To use NetWeaver Voice, you need the following systems with activated usage types:

·        SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment with an activated voice modeling add-on.

This is the development environment you need to develop voice applications.

●      SAP NetWeaver 7.0 BI (optional)

The Visual Composer Voice Kit is integrated with BI to provide basic reporting. More sophisticated reporting functionality is optional.

●      Third-party VoiceXML-compatible gateway (external system)

You render the output of the NetWeaver Voice application on a third-party VoiceXML compliant gateway.

Voice application can be implemented only by incorporating a third-party VoiceXML-compatible gateway.

The following graphic depicts how the VoiceXML gateway interacts with the Application Server:

Calls come in to a VoiceXML gateway and trigger HTTP requests in the application server. For each request, a page of VoiceXML is generated dynamically and returned to the VoiceXML gateway. New requests are issued by the gateway based on the contents of the page and further input from the caller. As responses come back, the application server uses the dialog definition from the application model to render for the next page, and so on.

What Data Can You Access?

NetWeaver Voice uses the Visual Composer search capabilities for all supported data sources, such as ESA, BAPI, or CAF. Codeless calls to back-end systems eliminate fragile and repetitive custom integrations.

What Technologies Are Involved?

SAP NetWeaver Voice is similar to a Web application, but based on these technologies:

·        Telephone applications, also called Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

·        Speech recognition and telephone keypads (touch-tones) for input

·        Recorded speech and computer-generated speech, called text to speech (TTS) for output

·        Voice-enabling access to business transactions using Enterprise Services, RFC, or BAPI

In common with Web applications is the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used as the application communications protocol:

While the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is used to write Web pages, the Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) is used to specify the interactive dialog between the caller and the system in a voice-enabled application.

Here is an example of VoiceXML code generated by publishing a graphic model using the Visual Composer Voice Kit:

<form id="getPhoneNumber">

   <field name="phone">

     <grammar src="../grammars/phone.grxml"

          type="application/srgs+xml" />

     <grammar src="../grammars/phone_dtmf.grxml"

           type="application/srgs+xml" />

     <prompt>

          <audio src="../audio/ask_phone.wav">

           What's your phone number?

          </audio>

     </prompt>

     </field>

   <field name="confirmPhone">

     <grammar src="../grammars/yes_no.grxml"

          type="application/srgs+xml" />

     <grammar src="../grammars/yes_no_dtmf.grxml"

          type="application/srgs+xml" />

     <prompt> <var expr="phone"/> is that right? </prompt>
     <filled>
       <if expr="confirmPhone">

         <submit next="processPhone.jsp"/>

       <else/>

         <prompt>Sorry, please try again.</prompt>

         <clear/>

       </if>

     </filled>

   </field>

</form>

How Does NetWeaver Voice Fit into the Composition Environment Strategy?

NetWeaver Voice addresses the component and process modeling stages and consumes services and business objects. You can use NetWeaver Voice to create individual voice UI components, such as a dialog to collect a credit card number, and you can reuse these components in new business-process models.

How to Test Your Voice Applications?

You can either use a VoiceXML gateway or SAP Text Application Gateway (STAG) to test your voice applications.

Using VoiceXML gateway for testing allows you to test the voice application more close to a real-time scenario.

Using STAG to test your voice applications is not considered as an efficient way of testing because it cannot recognize natural voice. It allows you to test your voice application by submitting inputs only in the form of text and not voice. However, STAG provides a quicker way of testing your voice applications as it is a runtime component of SAP NetWeaver Voice and does not require any configuring unlike VoiceXML gateway.