Telephony Interface of the ExtraPlanT Multi-agent Production Planning System

ExtraPlanT system is a multi-agent production planning system designed for small factories, which needs to react quickly on market changes. To deal with this requirement, ExtraPlanT system has been equipped with an extra-enterprise access feature that allows managers to access and use the system whenever and wherever they need. One possibility of the extra-enterprise access is a telephony interface, which uses computer based speech recognition and synthesis. The interface has been built on a VoiceXML technology, and it uses speech and DTMF input and a synthesized speech output. VoiceXML documents for the interpreter are generated by JAVA servlets running on Tomcat server. For the ExtraPlanT telephony interface, two techniques has been developed to overcome the main disadvantages of telephony interfaces: sequential, transient and slow presentation of information. The first technique is Two-level communication model based on Analytical Module knowledge-based system that transforms data into a short summary. The second technique is a Dynamical selection of prompts wording, which selects a wording of the prompts according to user experience.