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V-commerce:Voice of the Web

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

E-commerce is, now, not just selling a

T-shirt over the World Wide Web. Over the last few years the concept of e-commerce has

been well understood and has captured the attention of the Web people. An IDC report shows

that about $400 billion worth of goods and services will be sold over the Internet by the

year 2002. Now, it seems to be a reality.

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Most of the companies are setting up the

required infrastructure to build their e-commerce capability and, hence, increase the

reachability and accessibility. To understand e-commerce, it is essential to know its

three basic stages.

-Shop (Front Store)–The buyer surfs the Web site

"catalogue" searching for products.

-Purchase (Stage)–Buyer selects the mode of

payment (credit card, etc.,) and authenticates the buy.

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-Support (Ground)–Status report, assistance, and

personalization

These stages apply to any transactions like

business-to-consumer and business-to-business operations.

The Internet, especially WWW, has really

changed the method of doing business radically. This process is now a chain reaction and

is irreversible.

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Telecom industry zealots realized this

process and this realization made them reconsider their strategies and business models. As

a result of this process they came out with new buzzword called V-commerce. This paper

tries to explain how both e-commerce and V-commerce help the end user community.

Why do we need it?

One of the major requirements of e-commerce is PC and Internet connectivity. Though PC

prices are reducing every day, still it has long way to go. Accessibility and reachability
are factors that influence this area. Let us see how exactly V-commerce is going to

address these issues.

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-Accessibility–People can use telephone, and cell

phone to do the transactions over the Web.

-Learning Curve–No need to learn how to use PC

and new technology. Just use the well versatile and convenient device.

-Cost–It is a matter of having a telephone or

cell phone.

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How is it possible?



Some of the advancement in speech recognition technology over the last few years and
latest breakthrough has made the execution of self-service transactions possible. Many big

companies are behind the success of technology and planning to come to market in a big

way. In any integrated technology, interfaces plays a major role and, hence, the

implementation methods.

V-commerce applications



By nature V-commerce applications are designed to complement with e-commerce technology
and, hence, the components also go well within the frame. Java or ActiveX developers can

fit in the speech objects into the existing standard Java or ActiveX applications. To

develop the applications they can make use of standard C++ API calls. Speech objects can

customize, create using the existing front-end tools like VC++, visual basic, etc.

VoXML (Voice Mark-up Language)



VoXML is an application of extensible mark-up language (XML) consisting XML tags for
speech recognition and natural language. Standard HTML editor can be used to develop VoXML

documents.

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In this case a programmer uses VoXML to

call speech objects to handle the dialog. Once this application is ready all he needs to

do is submitting (or publishing) it to platform server for hosting. This process is

analogous to the authoring and publishing a page of standard HTML.

Complement to E-commerce



Accessibility of e-commerce applications to everyone is still a long way to reach.
V-commerce complements e-commerce in the following ways.

-Reachability: Ratio of telephone to

computer is the natural answer. Since the installed base and infrastructure is very strong

for telecom, it is a matter of using it and doing the voice transactions.

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-Simplicity: No need to learn the

intricacies of new devices and technology. Just pick up the well-known and versatile

instrument and execute the transactions.

-Investment protection: Existing

infrastructure can be used. No additional cost involved.

-Availability: Connectivity, anywhere

and everywhere dream is a long time desire of mobile users. Users can use speech

recognition technology and execute the transaction from the most available and accessible

device.

-Price performance: It is the first

choice in this regard.

Conclusion



V-commerce is going to be the natural choice for e-commerce enhancement and development.
It helps the human race to reach and share the information using well-known and versatile

devices.

Internet home banking (virtual banking) and

e-trade are classical example for V-commerce and e-commerce coupling. Cyber customer need

not look for "Web site found connecting" message. Customers can do the

multi-money transfers at there fingertips literally.

V-commerce vs

E-commerce
V-commerce is a complementing technology

to e-commerce. It has emerged to enhance the strengths of the latter. At

the same time it will make use of reachability, accessibility, and

thousands of other e-commerce applications to reach the millions of

people. For example, Internet home banking customer can use any convenient

devices to execute the transactions over the Web with almost real time

response.
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