CallXpress 8 offers new Voice User Interface (VUI)

Did you know CallXpress 8 offers the option* to have integrated speech recognition?  By adding speech recognition to the system, users can be configured to use the new Voice User Interface (VUI) that allows them to navigate the features of their mailbox using spoken commands.

What is the Voice User Interface (VUI)?
Use easy to remember spoken commands to manage your messages, place calls to other system users, place calls directly to phone numbers and manage your mailbox settings completely hands-free to comply with government regulations when accessing your mailbox while driving.

• Easier to remember how to navigate as it uses commands that you would naturally say to perform actions
• Provides powerful features that would be difficult to use in a traditional DTMF TUI
• Most commands are the same as Seneca making it easy to transition from Seneca to the CallXpress VUI
• Utilize your 50 free UM & PA licenses to call contacts & manage your calendar from the VUI

* Speech Recognition is a licensed feature of CallXpress and is licensed on a per-resource basis.  Speech resources are pooled and allocated to ports as needed on a first-come first-served basis.

Why upgrade to CallXpress 8?

So you’ve heard the buzz….CallXpress 8, AVST’s next generation feature-rich Unified Communications platform delivers high availability, scalability, centralization, cost savings, mobility and more.  But what does this mean to you?

It means that CallXpress 8 delivers the mission critical functionality you have been looking for while protecting your current and future communications infrastructure.

Here are the some of the highlights of CallXpress 8:

• High Availability and Disaster Recovery – New, multi-call server architecture delivers continuous high availability and avoids system downtime.   A multi-server architecture combined with Neverfail®, a fully synchronized hot standby, provides IT administrators with the peace of mind that CallXpress is running 24×7.
• Centralization – CallXpress 8 provides customers with the ability to centralize messaging and call processing applications by using their existing voice or data networks and deploying AVST’s survivable call server technology or SIP gateways.
• Speech -  CallXpress provides speech access to your company’s communication infrastructure and real-time call connectivity. It also offers hands-free mobile management of telephone calls, e-mails, fax messages, contacts and calendar and complies with the hands-free mobile phone laws enacted in many states and countries.
• Personal Assistant - Provides Find-me/Follow-me capabilities to automatically route calls to the most appropriate telephone based on their current presence as well as Calendar and Contact management for users of Microsoft® Exchange and IBM® Lotus Notes®.  When combined with existing mobility applications such as unified messaging, voice user interface, and single number/single mailbox, CallXpress 8 becomes the most mobility-enabled solution offered by AVST to date.
• Scalability – Now able to scale up to 384 ports and 40,000 users, CallXpress 8 doubles the scalability of previous versions and can be networked for larger capacity.
• Interoperability – CallXpress 8 is compatible with more than 250 TDM, IP-PBX, and Centrex integrations with the ability to support up to 10 switches on a CallXpress system.
   

Understand the Benefits of Upgrading to CallXpress 8

AVST believes it is critical for customers to continually utilize the latest version of software. Proactive upgrades ensure optimal performance, continued feature enhancements, increased stability, and ongoing compatibility with emerging communications technology. Click here to view a feature matrix that lists many of the features available with recent versions of CallXpress.

Related Links:

• CallXpress 8 Unifying Communications Brochure
• High Availability Datasheet 
• Personal Assistant Datasheet 
• Legacy Voicemail Replacement Datasheet

Turn Your Mobile Phone Into Your Virtual Office

In today’s fast-paced world, we could all use some extra assistance to help us get through our day a little more efficiently. Put CallXpress Personal Assistant to work for you and increase both your productivity and customer satisfaction.

Whether you are in the office, in your car, stuck in an airport, or someplace else without an Internet connection, CallXpress Personal Assistant is at your service to:

• Listen to, create, change, or delete meetings and appointments
• Accept or decline meeting requests from others
• Call and manage your contacts
• Route calls to the most appropriate telephone based on your location and availability
• Notify you of missed calls
• Perform interactive call screening to divert an incoming call to another person, or acknowledge a call with a brief message that is played to the caller before they are transferred to your voicemail
• Transfer calls from your mobile phone to your office phone and vice versa
• Record a conversation

Related Articles:

• CallXpress 8 Personal Assistant Datasheet

CallXpress 8.0 Beta Trial

• Multi-box Architecture
  CallXpress now has the capability of being deployed on a single server or across multiple servers for greater scalability and increased availability. CallXpress 8.0 supports up to 96 ports and 10,000 subscribers in a single server deployment or up to 384 ports and 40,000 subscribers in a multi-server deployment.
• Speech Recognition
  Adding Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) resources to the system allows customers to build speech-based auto attendants where callers interact with the system using speech commands rather than traditional DTMF keys. Additionally, a new Voice User Interface (VUI) allows subscribers to manage their messages and mailbox using speech commands.
• Availability and Find-me/Follow-me
  CallXpress can now control features like find-me/follow-me based on the subscriber’s availability. For example, an auto attendant transfer to a subscriber using find-me/follow-me and is "in the office", might ring their desk phone first, followed by their mobile phone. When the subscriber is "out of the office" it would only ring their mobile phone.
• Microsoft® Exchange®/IBM Lotus® Notes® Calendar and Contacts
  Using the new Voice User Interface, unified messaging subscribers can manage their calendar appointments and contacts. For example, a user can hear all of their meetings and appointments for the current day by saying "get calendar for today".
•  Web PhoneManager
  Web PhoneManager (WPM) has been greatly enhanced with JavaScript/AJAX support for much improved usability when managing messages. Also, playback of messages using streaming audio has been changed to use MP3 audio through Adobe Flash Player for faster playback, greater browser and operating system compatibility, and greatly simplified installation and configuration.
• G.729 Audio Encoding
  G.729 audio encoding provides support for remote workers and centralized voicemail where G.729 compression is used.
• Dialogic 1000 Series Media Gateway
  A Dialogic Media Gateway (DMG) can be used to integrate a local or remote telephone system to CallXpress using SIP between CallXpress and the DMG. The DMG then connects to the telephone system using analog lines with in-band signaling, analog lines with serial link signaling, or station set emulation.

Protecting Yourself Against Toll Fraud

These days with unlimited long distance calling plans for $30/month or less, you don’t hear too much about toll fraud taking place any more. However, it still happens from time to time where the hacker places international calls which can still be quite costly. Below is some info on just some of the ways to help protect yourself agains toll fraud. This is by no means intended to be a complete list, but to highlight some of the security related features in CallXpress that you can use to help protect yourself against toll fraud.

The first thing to remember about security is that it is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. For example, calling random employees posing as someone in the company’s Telecom/IT department and asking people for their security code is the oldest trick in the book and yet still very effective.

Some of the ways CallXpress helps to protect from toll fraud are:

• Security code expiration – Forces users to change their security code on a periodic basis
• Security code history – Forces users to create a certain number of unique security codes before allowing them to repeat one
• Advanced security policy – Forces users to create security codes that do NOT contain simple combinations of digits like 0000, 1234, 2468, etc. that are easy to guess
• Login attempts – Restricts a user to just 2 attempts per call to enter their correct security code. After the 2nd attempt, the call is automatically disconnected.
• Mailbox lockout – Locks the mailbox after so many login attempts such that an administrator has to unlock the mailbox before it can be used again
• Dial plan – Restricts what numbers a user’s mailbox is allowed to call for things like callout services (aka through-calling), message notification, live reply, etc.
• Trunk to Trunk reply – Allows/restricts live reply to external numbers

In addition to configuring the CallXpress security features, it’s also recommended that you program the PBX to restrict services on the CallXpress ports to only those being offered to your user population. For example, many PBXs can restrict trunk to trunk connections involving voicemail ports.

Lastly, there’s not much protection against somebody giving a hacker their security code, so you should periodically remind users to never give their security code to anyone (including Telecom/IT staff) and that they should report any instance where someone asks for their password in person, over the phone, via email, etc.