Plum provides gateway services for customer-developed VoiceXML applications, and also provides end-to-end hosting of complete enterprise IVR solutions. All Plum hosted solutions include telephony gateway integration and hosting of the VoiceXML Interpreter. We provide DID local access numbers in countries around the globe. Depending on the application requirements, the VoiceXML Interpreter can provide DTMF-only support, or integrate best-in-class voice technologies for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The Plum Voice Portal modular architecture also allows for integration with voice technology components as external services provided by outboard servers. If required by the application, Plum can farm out CPU-hungry processes such as TTS to a farm of dedicated servers. This enables us to integrate a wide variety of voice technologies, including both open source and licensed commercial technologies running on any platform. It also allows us to architect our systems to maximize performance and efficiencies of scale.
Customers are free to use any web technologies and middleware to serve their own VoiceXML applications through the Plum gateway. The Plum Voice Interpreter connects to all application servers remotely through HTTP. Intelligent caching of VoiceXML and audio files by the Interpreter minimizes the impact of network latency. IP blocking and VPN technology such as IP tunneling can be used to secure sensitive applications and data. Plum often develops and hosts complete VoiceXML application suites for enterprise clients. Depending upon the integration requirements for the application, the VoiceXML app server can either connect in real time to back-end servers via a secure IP link or connect to a Plum-hosted relational database that is periodically updated with your enterprise data through a batch process.
