35.1 NEED FOR CTI

CTI technology is finding applications in every business sector. Why? The following are the reasons:

• Throughout the world, the use of telephones is very high. In most developed countries, the telephone density (number of telephones per 100 population) is anywhere between 50 and 90. In developing countries , it is lower—between 2 and 20, but still higher than the number of computers.

• To access the information using a telephone is much easier than using PC, mostly because voice is the most convenient mode of communication, and operating a telephone is much easier than operating a PC.

• With the advent of automation, much of information is available on computers—whether from banks, libraries, transport agencies, service organizations, and others—some of this information needs to be provided to users/customers.

• Throughout the world, manpower costs are rising . If the monotonous work of distributing routine information can be automated, organizations can save money and use their human resources for more productive work.

• CTI provides the platform for unifying the various messaging systems. It benefits the user because it provides a single device for accessing different messaging systems such as e-mail, voice mail, and databases.

For these reasons, CTI is emerging as one of the highest growth areas in IT. However, CTI is not a new technology; it is a combination of many existing technologies to provide innovative applications to users.

The purpose of computer telephony integration (CTI) is to access information stored in computers through telephones. CTI is gaining practical importance due to the high number of telephones and availability of large amounts of information in computers.

Note

CTI finds applications in every business sector—banking, education, transportation, service organizations, entertainment, and others.

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35.2 TECHNOLOGY INGREDIENTS OF CTI

CTI uses various technologies to provide value-added services to users. The three important technologies on which CTI is based are:

• Text-to-speech conversion

• Interactive voice response systems

• Automatic speech recognition

The three technology ingredients of CTI are: (a) text-to-speech conversion; (b) interactive voice response systems; and (c) automatic speech recognition.

We will study these technologies in the following sections.

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