3270 and custom servers

Custom servers and 3270 servers are programs that provide a bridge between Blueworx Voice Response and data that resides outside Blueworx Voice Response. The data can be on a remote host computer or on the same pSeries computer workstation as your Blueworx Voice Response software. The data can include business information held in a database, or digitized voice data.

• A custom server is a program, using C language or C++ language, that provides an interface between data on host computers and Blueworx Voice Response, or performs other processes, such as speech recognition and text-to-speech, generation of fax output, or coordinated call and data transfer.

  A custom server that uses the signaling interface, a specialized library of C subroutines, is known as a signaling process. This is used to manage an external signaling device that controls or monitors telephony channels. For more information, see the Blueworx Voice Response for AIX: Programming for the Signaling Interface information.

• A 3270 server lets you access data on remote 3270 host computers. If you have existing 3270 host applications that retrieve data needed by your Blueworx Voice Response applications, you can create a 3270 server to obtain this data.

Access to remote data means that your voice applications can use this data to perform a variety of tasks, such as:

• Read a file or database to retrieve information that a caller needs
• Maintain or manipulate files based on a caller's request
• Obtain information from a combination of sources and business applications on other host computers
• Call another program to perform any predefined process
• Perform calculations and return the result to the state table
• Generate business statistics based on telephony activity
• Recognize spoken words using an external speech recognition server
• Speak words created by an external text-to-speech server or sent from another Blueworx Voice Response system
• Generate fax output.

Both 3270 servers and custom servers must be invoked from a state table, which controls the dialog with the caller.