Development of iSpeak: A voice activated Relationship Management System

A constant source of frustration for subscribers of mobile telephony in Nigeria is the quality of customer care service. The ubiquitous IVR systems deployed by service providers often ends in long and winding texting of digits that terminate in calls to agents with poor CRM attitudes. Automation of most of the functions of the human agent goes a long way in mitigating this problem. This paper describes iSpeak – a system designed to reduce the human–to–human (H2H) interaction in the complaint-lodging and solution provision process to a minimal level where it is not possible to eradicate it totally by a replacement with human–to–system (H2S) interactivity. iSpeak has an inherent capacity for improving the efficiency and drastically cutting CRM cost of corporate organizations. This comes with the attendant advantage of improved business-customer relationship. Keywords – Automatic Speech Recognition, Customer Care Service, Speech-control, Customer Voice Model, Voice Print, Voice Recognition

Past, present and future of IP telephony

“Copyright © [2008] IEEE. Reprinted from International Conference on Communication Theory, Reliability, and Quality of Service, 2008. CTRQ '08. ISBN:978-0-7695-3190-8. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.”Since the late 90's IP telephony, commonly referred to as Voice over IP (VoIP), has been presented as a revolution on communications enabling the possibility to converge historically separated voice and data networks, reducing costs, and integrating voice, data and video on applications. This paper presents a study over the standard VoIP protocols H.323, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), and H.248/Megaco. Given the fact that H.323 and SIP are more widespread than the others, we focus our study on them. For each of these protocols we describe and discuss its main capabilities, architecture, stack protocol, and characteristics. We also briefly point their technical limitations. Furthermore, we present the Advanced Multimedia System (AMS) project, a new system that aims to operate on Next Generation Networks (NGN) taking the advantage of its features, and it is viewed as the successor to H.323 and SIP

Network convergence and QoS for future multimedia services in the VISION project

The emerging use of real-time 3D-based multimedia applications imposes strict quality of service (QoS) requirements on both access and core networks. These requirements and their impact to provide end-to-end 3D videoconferencing services have been studied within the Spanish-funded VISION project, where different scenarios were implemented showing an agile stereoscopic video call that might be offered to the general public in the near future. In view of the requirements, we designed an integrated access and core converged network architecture which provides the requested QoS to end-to-end IP sessions. Novel functional blocks are proposed to control core optical networks, the functionality of the standard ones is redefined, and the signaling improved to better meet the requirements of future multimedia services. An experimental test-bed to assess the feasibility of the solution was also deployed. In such test-bed, set-up and release of end-to-end sessions meeting specific QoS requirements are shown and the impact of QoS degradation in terms of the user perceived quality degradation is quantified. In addition, scalability results show that the proposed signaling architecture is able to cope with large number of requests introducing almost negligible delay

Conveying and Handling Location Information in the IP Multimedia Subsystem

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), specified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), is a key element in the next-generation network (NGN) converged architecture. Extending the IMS towards provisioning support for location based services (LBS) will enable enhanced services and offer new revenues to the operator. Conveying location information in the IMS and connecting the IMS with a positioning system are still open issues. This paper presents the design and implementation of an IMS Location Server (ILS) integrating IMS with a positioning system. From the IMS perspective, the ILS serves as a service enabler for LBS. In order to demonstrate proof-of-concept in enhancing IMS-based services, two prototype service scenarios have been implemented: Location-aware Messaging (LaM), and Location-aware Push-to-Talk over cellular (LaPoC). Some work has been done by the IETF in the area of location information transport based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). This paper proposes improvements in this area, primarily related to reducing the necessary amount of signaling with the specification of a new type of location filter. We have conducted measurements in a laboratory environment in order to illustrate our proposed solution and verify the benefits compared to existing solutions in terms of traffic load and session establishment time. Furthermore, we present a case study integrating the ILS with the Ericsson Mobile Positioning System (MPS)

A Comprehensive Survey of Voice over IP Security Research

We present a comprehensive survey of Voice over IP security academic research, using a set of 245 publications forming a closed cross-citation set. We classify these papers according to an extended version of the VoIP Security Alliance (VoIPSA) Threat Taxonomy. Our goal is to provide a roadmap for researchers seeking to understand existing capabilities and to identify gaps in addressing the numerous threats and vulnerabilities present in VoIP systems. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to vulnerabilities reported in a variety of VoIP products. We identify two specific problem areas (denial of service, and service abuse) as requiring significant more attention from the research community. We also find that the overwhelming majority of the surveyed work takes a black box view of VoIP systems that avoids examining their internal structure and implementation. Such an approach may miss the mark in terms of addressing the main sources of vulnerabilities, i.e., implementation bugs and misconfigurations. Finally, we argue for further work on understanding cross-protocol and cross-mechanism vulnerabilities (emergent properties), which are the byproduct of a highly complex system-of-systems and an indication of the issues in future large-scale systems