Abstract: Method, system, and computer program product for building a voice prompt menu for a collection of portlets by acquiring a list of portlets, building a voice menu comprising voice menu items to activate each of the portlets, acquiring a portlet profile containing customization information, and adapting the voice menu using the customization information in the portlet profile. The web portlet may define custom characteristics for consideration by the voice aggregator, for instance, in the positions for its menu items in the hierarchy of the voice portal menu.

Abstract: A method of producing magnesium alloy strip, suitable for use in the production of magnesium alloy sheet by rolling reduction and heat treatment, involves casting magnesium alloy as strip, using a twin roll casting installation. In the casting, the thickness and temperature of the strip exiting from between rolls of the installation are controlled whereby the strip has a microstructure characterised by a primary phase having a form selected from deformed dendritic, equiaxed dendritic and a mixture of deformed and equiaxed dendritic forms. The resultant strip is amenable to production of sheet material by application of a homogenizing heat treatment followed by rolling and annealing.

Abstract: An interactive voice response system (IVR) is described for processing multiple voice application instances, said system comprising: at least one resource such as a speech synthesizer or speech recognition engine; one voice application using said at least one resource; telephony software for determining that at least two instances of the same voice application will use said at least one resource simultaneously; and further telephony software for forcing the instances of the voice applications to be delayed with respect to each other whereby the risk of IVR overloading the at least one resource is reduced. The delay is forced in an active step in a voice application such as answering the application or playing a prompt in the application only if it is determined that future resource utilization (FRM) is above resource utilization capacity (RUC).

Abstract: An interactive voice response method and system comprising a VoiceXML browser for processing an interaction with a user. A music score (for example a MIDI file) describing background music for playing during the interaction, and a music synthesizer for generating background music from the music score and from acoustic parameters are included. Acoustic parameters are generated whereby the music synthesizer may be controlled independently of the music score to change the audio environment during an interaction.

Abstract: The design and testing of integrated circuits in wafer form for production faults, in the absence of irradiation, is described. This is achieved by fabricating test circuits on each wafer at the periphery of the sensor array. In a preferred arrangement, two test circuits are fabricated on each wafer; one for testing the word lines and the other for testing the bit lines and individual sensing sites. The test circuits are controlled by external signals to input predetermined patterns of data to the array and the array output patterns are compared with the input patterns to assess the level of production faults.