The Telecom Web Application Framework

The World Wide Telecom Web (WWTW) (also known as
Spoken Web) is emerging as an alternate web for the under-
privileged, navigable entirely through a voice based interface
using an ordinary telephone. A node in the WWTW graph
is a voice application called a VoiceSite and is accessible over
a simple phone call. VoiceSites are hyperlinked through Hy-
perspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP).
However, several challenges need to be addressed for large
scale development, deployment, interworking and usability
of such VoiceSites. First and foremost, the set of users that
need to be supported vary from software developers to illit-
erate rural farmers. Second, the fact that the primary user
interface is voice based and over telephony presents its own
challenges and opportunities. Third, most voice applica-
tion frameworks currently available make it hard to separate
navigational flow from process flow which makes systematic
application development even harder.
This paper presents Telecom Web Application Framework
(TWAF) – an application development and deployment frame-
work that is designed to support rapid development of Tele-
com Web applications (i.e. VoiceSites) while addressing the
issues and requirements mentioned. We present the archi-
tecture, end-to-end design and a proof-of-concept implemen-
tation of the TWAF framework.

By: Arun Kumar, Sheetal K. Agrawal and Priyanka Manwani

Published in: RI08017 in 2009

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TWAF-2008.pdf

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