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The Banking Alerts Reference Application: Overview

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  Microsoft Speech Technologies Homepage

With the growth of communications connectivity, many commercial enterprises have identified alert notifications as an important type of functionality to add to their applications. Currently, most notifications are delivered by short message service (SMS) or e-mail. Using Microsoft Speech Application SDK Version 1.1 (SASDK), developers can speech-enable the alert notification process. For example, developers can use the SASDK to speech-enable an application so that when certain criteria that are specified by a customer are met, the application calls the customer, plays a notification message, and then responds to the customer's subsequent directions.

The Banking Alerts reference application is a simplified illustration of an alert-driven, Web-based, speech-enabled banking application. Bank customers set criteria that determine when the application sends a notification alert. When the application detects that the criteria for sending an alert notification on a customer's account have been met, it calls the customer and asks for identification. After the customer provides identification and the application verifies customer identity, the application plays the alert notification. The customer can interact further with the application to get more information, or to make transactions.

The purposes of the Banking Alerts reference application are to:

  • Demonstrate the function of an end-to-end application that provides a notification-by-telephone service to users.
  • Provide developers with a flexible, configurable application that can be used as a starting point for developing their own telephony applications.

To Run Banking Alerts

See Banking Alerts Installation and Deployment for instructions on installing and deploying Banking Alerts.

Note  Install Banking Alerts only on a computer that is a member of a domain. The architecture of Banking Alerts assumes a distributed, networked environment, and thus Banking Alerts and its components are not supported on computers that are not joined to a domain.

After installing and deploying Banking Alerts, run the application by opening the following Web page:

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https://localhost/Speech/Banking/Default.htm

Remarks

Banking Alerts is not designed to externally persist application state information, and under certain circumstances, Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 can cause application state information to be lost. This can happen if IIS shuts down a worker process that has timed out due to idle processing, or if IIS restarts a worker process during recycling. Banking Alerts is also not designed to run in multi-instance environments. In multi-instancing, two or more instances of a process run simultaneously. The occurrence of an overlapped application recycle and Web gardens are examples of multi-instance environments.

Banking Alerts is instead designed to run in an IIS environment that is configured to:

  • Run only one worker process for an application pool (which is the default value)
  • Disable application recycling functionality
  • Disable idle time-out of worker processes
  • Disable pinging functionality

See Also

Running A Banking Alerts Demonstration | Banking Alerts: Alerts and Dialogue Flow | Banking Alerts: Dialog Logic Diagrams | Banking Alerts Speech Controls: Inputs and Responses