Why does the technology of the speech world seem to persist at being
expensive?
It seems that there has never been a really cheap solution
to ivr. Development env's are expensive. Is it that there
just has not been a broad enough customer base over which to recover
the investments or is it that someone holds the patents and they are
just passing on the cost in license fees, or is it that to run the
apps you need cooperation of telcos most of the time? Or is it that I
am just not aware of a cheap way in.
No one seems to provide free trials of the entire solution, so I
cannot play around with it as a developer that is fully baked and demo
something that will get me excited enough to pay for an ide. If I
could just see and hear the darn thing work with a little demo app
that I create, I would be sold. |
Clarification of Question by
tracefile-ga
on
22 Apr 2005 18:02 PDT
that is, the developer is not fully baked but the ide is
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Clarification of Question by
tracefile-ga
on
23 Apr 2005 10:44 PDT
In response to efn-ga's comment, I guess what I have been wanting to
do is do an IVR system for the phone (pots version) that interacts
with a caller with all the usual functions available through voice --
executing an arbitrary program. I see various speech-to-text apps out
there, so that doesn't seem to be expensive, but the hardware/software
combination to build an IVR app seems to be. And, it would probably
be a general-vocabulary one.
I know I need a voice modem card to interface to pots with, but the
real missing piece seems to be the ide. Also, in production I would
not host it myself, so I would need a reasonable asp for this. The
thing that gets me is that there seems to be no real hard costs to
this, just arbitrary recapture of r and d, and that since IVR has been
around so long, though improving, it should be getting cheaper unless
some entity is artificially holding up the price.
That is my naive and isolated view, of which I would be most happy to be disabused.
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Request for Question Clarification by
mathtalk-ga
on
27 Apr 2005 09:30 PDT
Hi, tracefile-ga:
If I understand your point of view, the costs of hardware seem
reasonable enough to you (e.g. the IVR voice modem cards, T1 lines,
etc.), but the development platforms seem to be lagging, either in
terms of direct costs or usability (as for example an "inexpensive"
IDE that makes development/maintenance costly in terms of the
developer's time, opportunity costs, etc.).
I'm not sure what the frame of reference is for you in terms of
setting up the development environment. My impression is that IVR is
a relatively inexpensive niche to work in, as far as purely front-end
development goes. I'd be happy to put together some suggestions about
how I'd invest resources in setting up something of this kind, though
I'd be relying basically on the advice of friends who have years of
experience in it and not my own knowledge.
regards, mathtalk-ga
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Request for Question Clarification by
efn-ga
on
28 Apr 2005 18:57 PDT
Is gdurst-ga the same person as tracefile-ga? Are you offering to buy
my VoiceXML comment as an answer? I am a Google Answers researcher,
so I could post it as an answer if you think it's acceptable, and then
I would get paid. There is no way to pay for a comment.
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