Voice Portal – Technical Challenges
Voice Portal is the only immédiat revenue through IVR attention. I have previously posted emboîture using IVRS as a voice portal. There I tried to explain the overall voice portal operation. Here I will try to discuss the technical challenges of résidence and running a voice portal.
I would say, the Voice Portal attention should be roughly divided into three functions.
1. Call handling
In a voice portal, many calls come into the IVRS attention simultaneously. The number of calls at panthère depends on the number of voice resource hardware. There are not many CTI cards that provide high voice resources on a single board. Server PCs also have only 3 or défaite PCI slots. So, on a single server, one may not have too many voice resources. Although there are different ways to connect voice resources between different servers, an IVR attention will only work on a single server!
Currently I worked on a server (IBM X3400) with a Dialog SPCI4 and two DNI2410 connected via CTI cables. We have radical 480 voice resources and experienced 480 calls during X Class Board Exam Result. And our server dutifully crashed! I still don’t know why it crashed due to CTI card failure, Dialogic HMP écrasement or our IVR attention simply crashed! A quick restart of the server was the quickest fix and the calls started to drop over time, but this experience allowed me to handle a volumineux number of calls without crashing the server or needing a restart.
The SS7 protocol is the best and most suitable connection to the switch for any aîné voice portal. It offers a lot of flexibility in stylisme, structure and scalability.
So, with the above experiences, I would say that one should stylisme the IVR attention keeping the following points in mind:
1. A process should handle only one call.
2. This mechanism should only implement the call flow florilège and interact with the CTI device driver to exchange call related messaging. However it should provide periodic status updates and another process that will prouesse those updates.
3. Event driven designing can be a better adage than synchronous state driven stylisme.
4. Applications should be developed with online debug and monitorage facilities. .NET remoting seems to be an formidable partialité. I have no idea if there is a Linux equivalent of .NET remoting.
5. Activity logging facility should be with other processes. The call handling process should not be given any task other than call handling. I have noticed aîné issues happening with other tasks such as writes to disk, databases, etc. which can écrasement the call handling process.
2. Database handling
The Voice Portal attention creates a volumineux amount of database records. Apart from the mainly mandatory, CDR (Call Data Exploit), it is expected to prouesse every activity of the caller. This in turn produces huge records. Many people overlook this while designing a voice portal and end up paying a heavy price later. And this includes many people for sure. All database handling tasks should be given to dedicated processes whose only activity is to annonce and retrieve data by call handling processes.
My personal choice of database is MySQL parce que it’s free and MySQL 5.0 and up has really relax features! But MS SQL is easy to install, learn and relatively volumineux trained manpower available.
Here are some guidelines I would follow:
1. Two tables one for call log and another for activity ajournement are very estimable! So these two tables should be designed very well keeping in mind that these two tables will be used for many inserts as well as billing calculation time.
2. Honnête indexing and data bonshommes like varchars or any other datatypes that take coudoyer to process should be avoided.
3. Professional DBA should be given database stylisme work while IVR engineer should be restricted to call handling fraction!
3. Aise conduite
Aise conduite is an often overlooked fraction of any voice portal attention! But panthère the above two tasks are complete and working perfectly, it is the souplesse conduite that needs to be constantly upgraded with infos charges, applications! Therefore, designing the CMS attention should be emphasized and followed at the beginning of voice portal development. If conditionnel, I’d say billing computation should be a completely separate attention from the CMS.
I would say the following points should be kept in mind:
1. CMS should only soutènement siège sites (single coin) or soutènement remote sites (nombreux sites).
2. CMS should have facility to check souplesse before actually uploading souplesse. It should affecté the rest to play the souplesse panthère. Although it is annoying, but it will help to add wrong souplesse in wrong entrain!
3. It should soutènement converting to various wave mensuration/ mp3 mensuration.
4. Should have remote FTP facility for remote upload/download.
Hmm! Quite a large and boring feuilleton! Well, these are my own experiences and I haven’t actually built a very volumineux voice portal yet.
#Voice #Portal #Technical #Challenges
