Using Telephony Application Simulator

Article
07/05/2006

Telephony Application Simulator is the client that renders telephony applications in the Microsoft Speech Application SDK (SASDK). In contrast, Telephony Application Services (TAS) renders telephony applications in a staging and production environment. This topic describes the characteristic functionality of Telephony Application Simulator.

Use Telephony Application Simulator with Speech Debugging Console in the SASDK for unit testing. Before deploying a telephony application, test it on a staging server using TAS. For a general description of best practices in deploying .NET applications, see Deploying .NET Applications: Lifecycle Guide in the MSDN Library. For information on deploying SASDK applications, see Deploying Speech Applications.

To debug a voice-only application using Telephony Application Simulator, an AnswerCall or a MakeCall control must be added to the application's Start page. Without the presence of either an AnswerCall or a MakeCall control, the application will not connect to Telephony Application Simulator.

Speech Control Rendering

Telephony Application Simulator supports the following types of Speech Controls:

Basic Speech Controls
Dialog Speech Controls
Application Speech Controls
Call Management Controls

Scripting Support

Telephony Application Simulator provides the following HTML and scripting support:

support for a subset of XHTML
support for JScript .NET

Telephony Application Simulator requires the content of <script> tags to be wrapped into CDATA tags, otherwise the page fails to load. See the following example.

<script>
  <![CDATA[
        if (obj == null)
             i = 0;
   ]]>
</script>

Speech Controls render inline grammars to TAS and Telephony Application Simulator wrapped into CDATA tags. This is done automatically by controls and does not require any effort from the developer.

Warning Microsoft JScript .NET issues a security exception when partially trusted code attempts to create a Function object using either the eval or function constructs. For instructions on how to work around this issue, see this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

Web Browser Commands

Some navigation command functions are intuitively obvious in a document-driven application, but ambiguous in a dialogue-driven application. For that reason, the following commands are not provided in Telephony Application Simulator:

Back/forward navigation
Stop
Refresh

Security

Telephony Application Simulator imposes no security restrictions, treating all sessions as trusted sessions. TAS uses a list of Trusted Sites that includes, by default, https://localhost.

Protocol Support

Telephony Application Simulator does not support the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) protocol. TAS supports the CTI protocol.

Prompt Database File References

To reference prompt databases on Telephony Application Simulator, when Telephony Application Simulator is using desktop speech recognition and text-to-speech, use a UNC file path. When Telephony Application Simulator is using Speech Engine Services for speech recognition and text-to-speech, use a URL address.

To reference prompt databases on TAS, use a URL address.

When TAS is using desktop audio, Speech Controls will map local URLs to UNC paths.

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