A system for providing access to data via a voice interface. In one embodiment, the system includes a voice recognition unit and a speech processing server that work together to enable users to interact with the system using voice commands guided by navigation context sensitive voice prompts, and provide user-requested data in a verbalized format back to the users. Digitized voice waveform data are processed to determine the voice commands of the user. The system also uses a "grammar" that enables users to retrieve data using intuitive natural language speech queries. In response to such a query, a corresponding data query is generated by the system to retrieve one or more data sets corresponding to the query. The user is then enabled to browse the data that are returned through voice command navigation, wherein the system "reads" the data back to the user using text-to-speech (TTS) conversion and system prompts.

A system for providing access to data via a voice interface. In one embodiment, the system includes a voice recognition unit and a speech processing server that work together to enable users to interact with the system using voice commands guided by navigation context sensitive voice prompts, and provide user-requested data in a verbalized format back to the users. Digitized voice waveform data are processed to determine the voice commands of the user. The system also uses a "grammar" that enables users to retrieve data using intuitive natural language speech queries. In response to such a query, a corresponding data query is generated by the system to retrieve one or more data sets corresponding to the query. The user is then enabled to browse the data that are returned through voice command navigation, wherein the system "reads" the data back to the user using text-to-speech (TTS) conversion and system prompts.

A computer-implemented method is described for optimizing prompts for a speech-enabled application. The speech-enabled application is operable to receive communications from a number of users and communicate one or more prompts to each user to illicit a response from the user that indicates the purpose of the user's communication. The method includes determining a number of prompt alternatives (each including one or more prompts) to evaluate and determining an evaluation period for each prompt alternative. The method also includes automatically presenting each prompt alternative to users during the associated evaluation period and automatically recording the results of user responses to each prompt alternative. Furthermore, the method includes automatically analyzing the recorded results for each prompt alternative based on one or more performance criteria and automatically implementing one of the prompt alternatives based on the analysis of the recorded results.

A system for facilitating secure network communications includes a security computer system and corresponding software. The security system is utilized in conjunction with a voice browser residing on a server system. A user accesses the network by placing a call to the voice browser system. The voice browser includes a software module that creates a secure connection to the security system. The user provides an identification to the voice browser system that is transferred to and verified by the security system. Once the identification is verified, the user is prompted by the voice browser system to speak a phrase for voice verification. The verification speech signals are transferred from the voice browser system to the security system to verify those speech signals against speech signals of a particular authorized user associated with the identification and stored in a database. When the user is verified, the security system retrieves a user private key and certificate from the database. In response to the user subsequently accessing a web site residing on a secure server, the secure server and voice browser system initiate a secure key exchange. During the key exchange, data packets containing security information are transferred from the voice browser system to the security system for processing, while security information from the security system is transferred to the secure server via the voice browser system. The resulting session key is securely transferred to the voice browser system to facilitate secure communications between the voice browser system and secure server.