Future of Computer Telephony Integration

Today, the provision of telephony services seems to be one growing area. Computer telephony integration gives intelligent links between computer and telephone systems. Ideally, this technology will be an integral part of future communications for businesses and will be used by most firms to gain competitive advantage over companies that will be slow to embrace it. As a matter of fact, profit margins for these services will be incomparable. This paper hopes to explain the possible future applications of computer telephony integration.

In the current century, computer telephony integration is more utilized with the ACD, PBX and computer systems to provide a link for passing information to a database system. It is also possible to have more e-commerce transactions completed over the internet or over the telephone system. Unlike the previous years, the computer telephony integration application provides an interface between a computer system and the PBX.

In the area of computer telephony, where new services such as automated attendants (auto-attendants) are becoming a reality because of speech technology, it will be much easier to quantify the benefits brought by speech recognition to these services in the coming years. When properly used, speech recognition will also do more than save the money. Computer telephony integration is likely to provide new services that would not be possible without the use of speech recognition. Nevertheless, the future of telephony applications lies in natural language interaction.

The most compelling reason to consider IP telephony-type applications is the future integration of applications with voice. Over the years, a significant amount of work has gone into computer telephony integration (CTI) from traditional PBXs. These systems offer application programming interfaces such as telephony services API (TSAPI), telephony API (TAPI) and Java telephony API (JTAPI). This has enabled advanced call centre functions including screen pops for agents and active call routing between call centers. This is likely to continue and get more advanced in the future.

Technologists further believe that integrated voice/data applications will revolutionize the way people use these systems. For instance, unified messaging will enable users to access e-mail, voice mail and fax from one common server, using any media more effectively. Consequently, it will be possible for the receiver of a message to determine the media rather than the sender.

Moreover, integration with intelligent assistant-type software from various vendors will enable users to set up rules for management of all incoming calls. In the call centre, complex business rules including checking credit before accepting new orders will be applied to all forms of incoming communications uniformly. This will not only save costs, but it will also increase efficiency for organizations that can learn to leverage the technology.

Hopefully, in the near future, human beings will be able to communicate with computers the way they communicate with each other in speech. The graphical user interface (GUI) will be slowly replaced by a voice user interface (VUI) making automatic language translation possible. Whereas traditional PBX will not disappear overnight, the vendors will be forced to actively upgrade the existing products to become packet-enabled. This will in the end give customers more choices than ever.

Nevertheless, as telephony applications become more available, the real challenges will be in human factor engineering and in developing scalable solutions allowing customers to rapidly expand capacity as the demand increases. The technology will also provide an additional concern for the network since it provides another avenue into the enterprise resource that must be protected. In this case, PC networks will have to scale up to a large volume deployment. For high availability and high-density applications, embedded systems will generally be a better choice than software only solutions. They will offer greater scalability and more deterministic behavior.