2 Vocal Player

The Vocal Player tool allows you to replay all calls to your BeVocal Café account. Use it for usability testing and grammar tuning when developing your applications.

When a user interacts with your VoiceXML application, the entire telephone call is recorded. Click Vocal Player on the Tools & File Management menu to view a list of the calls that have been made to your account. You can then use Vocal Player to listen to selected calls.

In early stages of development, you can replay your own calls to an application to help debug it. Once you have released an application for general use, Vocal Player can help you test the usability of your application. You can replay user calls to check whether a user was confused by any part of the interaction. You may also identify phrases that need to be added to your application's grammars.

After you click Vocal Player, the Vocal Player Command Area appears with a list of calls from the current date.

Note: The Query field is only displayed for hosting customers who have previously defined queries that allow them to select the environment to search calls from. It is not displayed for non-hosting Cafe users. For more information, contact BeVocal Support.

Searching the Call List

You use the fields at the top of the Command Area to specify call list search criteria. For example:

•	To see entries for all calls made on a particular date, enter that date in both the From Date field and the To Date field and leave all other fields blank.
•	To see entries for all calls on a sequence of days, enter the first date in the From Date field, enter the last date in the To Date field, and leave all other fields blank.
•	To see entries for all calls made from a particular telephone, enter the phone number in the Caller ID field and leave all other fields blank.
•	To see only calls that generated errors, click the box next to Show error calls only.
•	To see an entry with a specific Session ID, enter the value in the SessionID field and leave all other fields blank.

After filling in the fields, click Submit to search the call list for calls that meet your search criteria. When the search is complete, the table header indicates how many matching calls were found. Calls are ordered by the time each call was placed, with the most recent one first.

To specify how many calls you want to see on each page of the call list, select a value for Results per page. The default is 20 calls per page. You can click the page number links at the bottom of the table to see the next set of calls.

The call table view is customizable. Click Customize View to select display columns from the following list:

•	Start Time--The time at which the call was placed
•	Caller ID--The telephone number from which the call was placed
•	Duration--The number of seconds that the call lasted
•	User ID--Your account number
•	Dialed Number--The telephone number that was called
•	Session ID--The unique call identifier, such as spacebar`2002-app-dev3-ch012-b0n82`.

Click Default in the Customize window to revert to the default settings.

Downloading Call Logs

Click Download log in the row for a particular call to download the a Zip file containing all files for the call to your computer. Save the file by selecting a location on your computer, and unzipping the file to a new folder. Each call must be located in its own folder.

Play these calls back using Vocal Player, as described in Listening to the Call.

Starting Vocal Player

Click Play log in the row for a particular call to start Vocal Player to listen to that call. A separate window opens containing the Vocal Player console.

Setting Up Vocal Player

To use Vocal Player, you must have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.5.7 installed, and have the Java Media Framework (JMF) .jar file and applet downloaded to your computer. If you do not have any of these set up, Vocal Player automatically prompts you to download and install the necessary software.

When you click Play log from the call list and components are missing, the following window appears.

If your computer does not have JRE 1.5.7 installed, you are prompted to installed it. Note that there may be a short delay before the prompt appears.

Click Yes and follow the installation instructions to install JRE 1.5.7.

After the JRE 1.5.7 installation has completed, you are prompted to install the .jar file required for Vocal Player.

Click Yes to download the package to you computer.

Lastly, you are prompted to download the Vocal Player applet to your computer.

Click Always to download the applet.

The Vocal Player console should then start with the selected call.

Note: If you are not prompted to install the necessary components, click the link labeled Click here beneath the empty Vocal Player console for further instructions.

Note: The current version of VocalPlayer has only been tested with the Sun Java Plug-in included with the Java 2 Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.5.7.

Understanding the Console

Vocal Player presents a call as a sequence of call states, one for each distinct portion of the call. The main possible elements of a call state include:

•	Prompt--Audio output that precedes the user input.
•	Result1--Speech recognizer's interpretation of the user's input.
•	Result2--Speech recognizer's alternate interpretation of the user's input.
•	Grammar--The grammar being used by the speech recognizer to interpret the user's input.

As you play the recording of a particular call, the Vocal Player console displays information about the current call state.

The fields in the upper right corner of the console contain the following information about the current call state:

•	Time--The start time of the current call state
•	Prompt Duration--The duration in seconds of the prompt played in this state
•	Speech Delay--The delay in seconds between the end of the prompt and the beginning of the user's speech
•	Speech Duration--The duration in seconds of the user input
•	Grammar--The grammar used to interpret the user input
•	Status--The recognition status of the user input

Below these fields, the Result fields display one or two of the most likely interpretations of the user's input. Each interpretation is paired with a Confidence field, which shows a value that reflects the likelihood that the corresponding result is the correct interpretation of the user's speech.

Remote and Local Modes

Vocal Player can be placed in either Remote or Local mode.

In Remote mode, Vocal Player plays the selected call from the Search Call List. Local mode allows you to play call logs that you have previously downloaded. When you click the Local button, you are prompted for the directory containing the log and media files for the call.

To select another downloaded call, click the Browse button (with three dots) to the right of the Local button.

Note: Before playing the call, unzip the downloaded .zip file to a new directory.

Listening to the Call

The buttons at the bottom of the Vocal Player console allow you to start and/or stop playing the recording as well as go to the starting or ending states of the call.

Positioning the Recording

The recording is initially positioned at the beginning of the call. You can change the current position in any of the following ways:

•	Click and hold the Rewind button (double left arrows to the left of the slider bar) to move backward in the call. The slider moves backward in the bar to indicate the current position within the call. The recording is positioned at the beginning of a call state.
•	Click and hold the Forward button (double right arrows to the right of the slider bar) to move forward in the call. The slider moves forward in the bar to indicate the current position within the call. The recording is positioned at the beginning of a call state.
•	Drag the slider within the bar to go to a call state whose position in the call is proportional to the position of the slider in the bar. The recording is positioned at the beginning of the call state. For example, drag the slider to the middle of the bar to go to the beginning of the call state that began about half way into the call.
•	Click Begin to move to the first call state in the call.
•	Click End to move to the last call state in the call.

Playing the Recording

Once the recording is positioned where you want it, you click Play to start playing the recording from that position.

You can pause play by clicking Stop and restart play by clicking Play again.

If you want Vocal Player to include pauses to more closely simulate the original call, select the Delay checkbox above the Rewind button before clicking Play.

Also, if you want to play an entire prompt wave file (as opposed to hearing only the portion actually played during the call) choose the file you would like to hear and click the Play wave button.

In some cases, prompt files from a call may not be available. In this case, when you attempt to play the call, a dialog box pops up and asks you for the base URI of the missing prompt files. If you have these files available locally, you may input that URI to include those files in the playback of the call.

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