— Photo: Special Arrangement

The Bangalore-based development base of Aspect Software where tomorrow's call centre technologies are being crafted.

Bangalore: The country that anchors three-fourths of the world's outsourced services — large chunks of them contact or call centres — helps to create many of the solutions which drive this business. The world's largest provider of Call Centre technology — the U.S.-based Aspect Software — has been helped by its India-based engineers in the development of its next flagship product: the IP 6.5 Unified solution due to become available globally in June.

Aspect president and CEO James Foy, in India last week, told The Hindu that significant contributions came from the India development arm, which has joined with the U.S.-based centres such as San Jose and Boston to create the next generation of ``Unified'' solutions.

These will permit a call centre to switch seamlessly from voice calls to Interactive Voice Response (IVR), to online chat — or rapid-fire exchange of text messages — all riding the Internet and exploiting the Voice over Internet Protocol: The ability to exchange telephonic calls as Internet messages. Indian engineers were also involved in harnessing the communication features of Microsoft's new Office 2007 server to jointly embed speech into many text applications from Aspect. When you make a call to a service centre anywhere in the world today and have the ability to do this on the phone or through an SMS message or through a Web portal, remind yourself: The guy (or gal!) at the other end could well be an Indian — and so are many of the nameless brains that made this technology happen.

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