With the introduction of TR/85, “Using ECMA-323 (CSTA XML) in a Voice Browser Environment,” CSTA has witnessed a strong adoption in the area of interactive voice services. Software agents, equipped with speech recognition and synthesis capabilities, are deployed in call centers to provide automated services. Leveraging the rich functionality CSTA, businesses are able to offer customers around the clock services without being limited to office hours or personnel constraints.
Accompanied with the strong adoption is the demand for simpler access to CSTA functionality. One such demand for CSTA concerns the need of CSTA in an object oriented programming style, the mainstream computer software development paradigm. Although CSTA has been specified in a manner consistent with an object oriented design, the CSTA Standard Suite has been exclusively composed of specifications that make CSTA functionality available in a service model. ECMA-323 and ECMA-348 specify an XML based syntax and WSDL for CSTA respectively.
This Technical Report demonstrates how developers can use CSTA in an object-oriented fashion. To broaden the reach, the TR bases the discussion on ECMA-335 (Common Language Infrastructure, or CLI) that enables an object model specification in a platform agnostic and programming language independent manner. The sheer volume reflecting the rich functionality makes it impractical to enumerate all the features of CSTA. Inspired by the success of TR/85, this TR will focus the discussion in the areas of call control and interactive voice services where the demand for CSTA object model seems to be particularly strong. Examples highly parallel to TR/85 are given in ECMA 334 (C#), a member of the CLI family.