Voice Call Properties

You can enable voice interaction with your virtual assistant, i.e., users can talk to the virtual assistant. For this, you need to enable one of the voice channels like IVR, Twilio, IVR-AudioCodes, etc and publish the bot on those channels.

There are some Voice Properties you can configure to streamline the user experience across the above-mentioned channels. These configurations can be done at multiple levels:

• Bot level – at the time of channel enablement;
• Component level – once you enable the voice properties at the bot level, then you can define the behavior for various components like:
  • Entity Node
  • Message Node
  • Confirmation Node
  • Standard Responses
  • Welcome Message

This document details the voice call properties and how they vary across various channels.

Channel Settings

Dialog Node Settings

On the Voice Call Properties panel for a node, you can enter node-specific prompts, grammar, as well as parameters for call-flow behavior such as time-out and retries.

Voice Call Properties apply only for the following nodes and message types:

• Entity Node
• Message Node
• Confirmation Node
• Standard Responses
• Welcome Message

Voice Call Settings Field Reference
The following sections provide detailed descriptions of each IVR setting, including descriptions, applicability to nodes, default values, and other key information.

Notes on Prompts: 

• You can enter prompts in one of these formats: Plain text, Script, File location of an audio file. If you want to define JavaScript or attach an audio file, click the icon before the prompt text message box and select a mode. By default, it is set to Text mode.
• You can enter more than one prompt messages of different types. You can define their order of sequence by dragging and dropping them.
• Multiple prompts are useful in scenarios where the prompt has to be played more than once, to avoid repetition, since the prompts are played in order.

Configuring Grammar

You will need to define at least one Speech Grammar to the IVR system.
There is no default Grammar that will be considered by the system. In this section, we will walk you through the steps needed to configure a Grammar system for the bot to function on the IVR system.

Typically for an IVR enabled bot, the speech utterance of the user will be vetted and parsed by the Grammar syntax at the IVR system before being diverted to the Bot.

Kore.ai supports the following Grammar systems:

• Nuance
• Voximal
• UniMRCP

Each one requires its own configuration.

Nuance

In case you want to use grammar syntax rules from Nuance Speech Recognition System, you need to get a license for the same. Once you register and obtain a license from Nuance, you will be given access to two files – dlm.zip & nle.zip. Ensure that the path to this VXML is accessible to the bot.

Configurations:

1. Set Enable Transcription to no
2. In the Grammar section:
   • Select the Speech or DTMF option as per your requirement.
   • In the text box to define vxml enter the vxml path to dlm.zip file. The url will be of the format: http://nuance.kore.ai/downloads/kore_dlm.zip?nlptype=krypton&dlm_weight=0.2&lang=en-US
   • Replace the above path according to your setup
   • The language code “lang=en-US” will be based on your setup
3. Add Grammar to add another path to nle.zip. Follow the above-mentioned steps.
4. Save the settings.

Voximal/UniMRCP

In case you want to use grammar syntax rules from Voximal or UniMRCP, you need to specify the transcription source.

Configurations:

1. Set Enable Transcription to yes
2. In the Transcription engine source text box that appears:
   • for Voximal, enter “builtin:grammar/text”
   • for UniMRCP, enter “builtin:grammar/transcribe”
3. You can leave the Grammar section blank, the above transcription source uri will handle the syntax and grammar vetting of the speech.
4. Save the settings.