TAS to VXML to GVP conversion

[victor]

Hi, all,

I am as new as it gets wehn it comes to VoiceXML. So, my question is rather simple:
1. can GVP use TAS (no). If no, can we convert TAS scripts to something that is used by GVP
2. can GVP use VoiceXML. If so, can we convert TAS to VoiceXML?

In a way, question2 is part of (1), but nevertheless, maybe there are other ways of using TAS with GVP. Any ideas?

Best regards,
Vic

[cavagnaro]

What is TAS? Tasmania? Turbine Air systems? 

[victor]

Telephone Application Service... seems like TAPI-based voiceXML.

[Adam G.]

Even wikipedia and google don't know what Telephone Application Service is 

VXML is basically a set of instructions that tell the Media Control Platform app in GVP v8 what to do to the call. GVP requests calls an Application Server (usually Tomcat or IIS) which runs a script (JSP or ASP or anything you like) to generate the VXML. For VXML v3 in GVP8 you need the NGI (Next Generation Interpreter) but as of GVP v8.1 you can also have the Legacy GVP Interpreter (GVPi) which uses TXML (Telera XML) or VXML v2.0 or 2.1 - this is useful as it's backward compatible with GVP v7.x scripts.

[Marc Robinson]

TAS is for the Conversant platorm. It's like an assembly language, but whoever designed it did a very bad job. Even if you could run it on another platform, you shouldn't, because it's such a badly designed language. You'll end up spending more time on the TAS than it's worth. Take the pain up front and convert it. In the long run, you'll be glad you did. The only possible reason not to convert it is if you have so many tens of thousands of lines that it would be a huge effort. Even then, it would be smarter to write a C program to convert the TAS to VXML. It shouldn't be all that hard. Let the C program do the bulk of the conversion, then read the result and clean it up by hand.

What might be smarter yet is to take your documentation and re-write the application from the ground up, making some of the improvements you've thought about in the past.

[René]

Hi,

I agree with Marc... It would be a nightmare to develop TAS to VXML translator. Even Avaya tools doesn't support such conversion.

R.

[Gulden_NL]

When I saw what TAS was I had a nice long laugh!  I never heard it called that; we used to use an acronym that wasn't very nice.  I was on the phone with Bell Labs tier 3 so often, I knew everyone by their voice.  I vote the Conversant as one of the worst IVR platforms sold.

Great to hear that someone is moving off of it and moving forward with VXML.

[MarcRobinson]

You are 100% correct. The Conversant blew. It was the absolute worst. I know this from painful personal experience. Not only did TAS stink, so did the scripting language. It lacked loop constructs and subroutines! I felt like I was back in the 1950s.

I'm glad that system is gone. It was obsolete the day it was built.