Voice business client

• US 20080249781A1
• Filed: 04/04/2007
• Published: 10/09/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 04/04/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: SAP SE
• Original Assignee: SAP AG (SAP SE)
• Inventors: Reddy, Srinivas, Hagedorn, Juergen, Botschek, Martin
• Granted Patent: US 8,102,975 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/270.1
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/00 Speech synthesis; Text to speech systems

Abstract

The subject mater herein relates to computer software and client-server based applications and, more particularly, to a voice business client. Some embodiments include one or more device-agnostic application interaction models and one or more device specific transformation services. Some such embodiments provide one or more of systems, methods, and software embodied at least in part in a device specific transformation service to transform channel agnostic application interaction models to and from device or device surrogate specific formats.

Claims

1. A method of servicing telephone calls by an interactive voice response system comprising:

initiating, by a voice gateway, an interactive voice response session with a voice business client in response to a received a telephone call;

requesting, by the voice business client, and receiving, from an application runtime environment, at least a portion of an application model;

transforming, by the voice business client, the received model into a voice gateway executable format; and

transmitting the transformed model to the voice gateway.

2. The method of claim 1, wherien the voice gateway includes a VoiceObjects server.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the application runtime environment processes the request for the at least a portion of the application model by:

retrieving the requested portion of the application model from storage;

processing the retrieved application model portion to retrieve any additional data identified in the model from one or more data stores;

rendering the processed application model into a markup-language; and

communicating the rendered model to the voice business client.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein

the application model is received by the voice business client in a generic format;

and

the voice business client transforms the generic format application model into a voice gateway specific format determined by the voice business client as a function of the type of voice gateway that initiated the interactive voice response session.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein transforming the received model into the voice gateway executable format includes:

evaluating the received model to identify one or more model patterns;

selecting one or more transformation rules as a function of the one or more identified model patterns; and

applying the selected transformation rules to the respective model patterns, the result of which is voice gateway executable instructions.

6. The method of claim 5, wherien transforming the received model into the voice gateway executable format further includes:

selecting one or more global transformation rules of the application model; and

applying the one or more global transformation rules to cause one or more globally available functions to be included in the voice gateway executable instructions.

7. The method of claim 5, wherein the one or more model patterns includes an application control model.

8. A device-readable medium, within executable instructions, which when processed by one or more suitably configured devices, causes the one or more devices to interactively service telephone calls into a voice gateway by:

initiating an interactive voice response session with a voice business client in response to a received a telephone call;

requesting, by the voice business client, and receiving, from an application runtime environment, at least a portion of an application model;

transforming, by the voice business client, the received model into a voice gateway executable format; and

transmitting the transformed model to the voice gateway.

9. The device-readable medium of claim 8, wherien the voice gateway includes a VoiceObjects server.

10. The device-readable medium of claim 8, wherein the application runtime environment processes the request for the at least a portion of the application model by:

retrieving the requested portion of the application model from storage;

processing the retrieved application model portion to retrieve any additional data identified in the model from one or more data stores;

rendering the processed application model into a markup-language; and

communicating the rendered model to the voice business client.

11. The device-readable medium of claim 8, wherein the application model is received by the voice business client in a generic format;

and

the voice business client transforms the generic format application model into a voice gateway specific format determined by the voice business client as a function of the type of voice gateway that initiated the interactive voice response session.

12. The device-readable medium of claim 8, wherien transforming the received model into the voice gateway executable format includes:

evaluating the received model to identify one or more model patterns;

selecting one or more transformation rules as a function of the one or more identified model patterns; and

applying the selected transformation rules to the respective model patterns, the result of which is voice gateway executable instructions.

13. The device-readable of claim 12, wherien transforming the received model into the voice gateway executable format further includes:

selecting one or more global transformation rules of the application model; and

applying the one or more global transformation rules to cause one or more globally available functions to be included in the voice gateway executable instructions.

14. The device-readable of claim 12, wherein the one or more model patterns includes an application control model.

15. An interactive voice response system comprising:

one or more voice gateways coupled to a voice network;

an application server communicatively coupled to the voice gateways;

a runtime environment operative on the application server to;

retrieve one or more application models from an application model storage repository in response to a requesting object, and

process the one or more application models by retrieving data associated with the application models from one or more locations and rendering the model and retrieved data to the requesting object in a descriptive text-based format; and

one or more voice gateway interface objects operative on the application server to;

receive an application request from a voice gateway and forward the request to the runtime environment,

receive the rendering of the model and data from the runtime environment,

transform the rendering into a format of the requesting voice gateway, and

dispatch the transformed rendering to the requesting voice gateway.

16. The system of claim 15, wherein the requesting object is the voice gateway interface object.

17. The system of claim 15, wherien the voice gateway includes a VoiceObjects server.

18. The system of claim 15, comprising:

two or more voice gateway interface objects.

19. The system of claim 15, wherien the voice gateway interface objects transform model and data renderings into the voice gateway executable format by:

evaluating the rendering to identify one or more patterns;

selecting one or more transformation rules as a function of the one or more identified patterns; and

applying the selected transformation rules to the respective patterns, the result of which is the transformed rendering that includes voice gateway executable instructions.

20. The method of claim 19, wherien the voice gateway interface objects transform model and data renderings into the voice gateway executable format further by:

selecting one or more global transformation rules of the one or more application model; and

applying the one or more global transformation rules to cause one or more globally available functions to be included in the voice gateway executable instructions.