Abstract: This invention relates to bulk testing of voice messaging applications by playing back an interaction from a recorded script. During development of a voice response system and application it is necessary to simulate a plurality of calls to the system so that the performance under strain can be monitored. Such a simulation can be performed by a bulk call generator which makes real telephone calls to the IVR through a private branch switch. However with bulk call testing some problems occur which rigorous functional and/or performance testing does not find. This is because real callers behave in unpredictable ways which were not expected or assumed by the creators of the functional and/or performance tests.

Abstract: There is provided method and apparatus for connecting computer network ip telephones using a speech recognition engine and a ip address database on an INTERNET server, The method comprises opening a voice channel from an ip phones to a speech recognition server; determining the name of the addressee from a speech input sent over the voice channel to the speech recognition server by the caller; determining an ip address from an ip address database corresponding to the determined addressee's name; opening a data channel from the database and transmitting the ip address to one or other of said telephones; and routing logic on said one or other ip phones using the ip address to establish a connection with the other ip phone. This allows the ip phones to access remote resources of speech recognition and a large database thereby taking advantage of more powerful resources that would be available locally.

Abstract: This invention relates to bulk testing of voice messaging applications by playing back an interaction from a recorded script. During development of a voice response system and application it is necessary to simulate a plurality of calls to the system so that the performance under strain can be monitored. Such a simulation can be performed by a bulk call generator which makes real telephone calls to the IVR through a private branch switch. However with bulk call testing some problems occur which rigorous functional and/or performance testing does not find. This is because real callers behave in unpredictable ways which were not expected or assumed by the creators of the functional and/or performance tests.