Reflection Platform

The Reflection platform handles control functions like startup and hand-off between eBots.  We provide standard services which simplify construction of robust natural language interfaces, including provisions for graceful fall-back to keypad (DTMF) input when a noisy channel defeats speech recognition. Underneath these services are state-of-the-art speech engines.

Reflection provides user interfaces for service creation and provisioning; operations, administration and maintenance; eBot configuration; user configuration; tenant configuration; and system configuration. 

Communications Interfaces

Our technology is agnostic to interface, supporting with equality all of the voice and text interfaces that are likely to be in common usage in the foreseeable future. An eBot can therefore interact with one or more people over multiple media.

eBots can interact with customers to specified telephone numbers and/or SIP addresses; interact with customers on instant messaging accounts on the major networks; and initiate outgoing communication over any media interface to customers for reminders, notifications, or to connect a caller to a customer or live agent.

This opens the door for new and interesting features, such as out-of-band whisper. While on a telephone call, you can be notified on another incoming call over an instant messaging interface without disrupting the audio path. A simple text response is all that is needed for the eBot to switch the calls. The eBot can even be programmed to deliver specific content to the call on hold and to apologize for the interruption.  Reminders can be fired into instant messaging sessions, cell phone text messaging or text pagers, or into an agent or other party's ear when on a call with the eBot listening.

IP Telephony

Reflection is  a full-featured IP soft-switch including media server, call agent, media gateway controller and media gateway.

Our media server provides the facilities needed by applications to interact with RTP streams from the Internet, IP-based next-generation networks, and of course the PSTN. Current capabilities include: wave play; wave record; speech synthesis; and speech recognition. Having licensed the best available speech technology for our media server, we ensure that callers have intelligible and effective conversations with eBots. 

Our call agent and media gateway controller is the hub of our telephony infrastructure. Designed to connect applications to the real world of communications networks, it provides a powerful API modeled on the ECTF's S.100 standard for media applications development. It adheres strictly to the forming IP Telephony standards such as SIP and MGCP, allowing it to interoperate with other vendors' media gateways and servers. The call agent is able to receive SIP calls directly, routing the RTP streams to our media servers.

Our media gateway connects to PSTN and wireless networks with ISDN PRI. NMS AG4000 PCI and CompactPCI cards provide a high-density connectivity solution, with multiple gateways providing n+1 scaling and reliability for large systems. The NMS DSP resources provide DTMF processing and echo cancellation to round out the overall application capabilities.

Text Messaging

Our text messaging server is a peer of our call agent, providing parallel services and APIs for connecting eBots to a plethora of text interfaces.

These include instant messaging networks such as MSN and Exchange 2000. In addition, email and chat are mapped through this interface to provide eBots with a single contact mechanism with multiple underlying architectures. 

Interoperability

Our technology can be integrated at several levels with new or existing infrastructure.  Reflection can operate connected to the PSTN via ISDN PRI, VOIP networks, or from within existing corporate infrastructure.

In those instances where tight integration with an existing call center or application infrastructure is necessary, our CTI (computer-telephony integration) server provides an eBot with the available call-associated telephony data from the PBX. 

When an eBot cannot satisfy a caller, the eBot transfers the call to an external queue and passes along call-associated data, which is popped to the human agent's screen. For high value customers, the eBot can perform a "warm transfer" by staying on the call to brief the agent while putting the caller through.

At left, an enterprise PBX  environment incorporates our solutions through our PRI and CTI interfaces. A next-generation network infrastructure incorporates our platforms at the SIP level. Our MGCP-based media gateway and media server also support standard interfaces for interoperability with other vendors.