Personal Voice Call Assistant: VoiceXML and SIP in a Distributed Environment

In this paper we introduce the architecture of a distributed service platform that integrates speech, web technology and voice-overIP technologies and describe how a specific service can be built using these technologies. The electronic assistant is an advanced voice-based service, that answers incoming calls and takes messages, consulting the user's calendar and address book. A novel contribution consists in the dynamic creation of the dialog (in form of VoiceXML pages) from calendar and other data residing in the platform’s databases, providing in this way actualized information to the caller (at call time). The described platform provides basic services (like call control) and allows developers to stack services, alleviating quick service generation. The assistant illustrates how several fairly basic building blocks can be combined into a powerful end-user application Sticking to our assistant as a guiding example, the first part of this paper gives details on the platform’s goals and architecture. The second part portrays the dynamic generation of user-friendly and intuitive VoiceXML pages and grammar from the calendar database, which proved to be an intricate task by itself.