Cisco Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal 11.0(1)

Gateways, VXML Gateways are often deployed in farms for Centralized deployment models,
or one per office in Branch deployments.

MRCP ASR/TTS Server

This device provides speech recognition services and text-to-speech services for VXML Gateway.
For capacity and redundancy reasons, a CSS is usually used to mediate between a farm of such
servers; if no CSS is used, then Unified CVP can support a maximum of two.

Cisco does not sell, OEM, or support any ASR/TTS Servers. Cisco does, however, test Unified
CVP with Nuance and IBM offerings. A certification process is available to allow additional
vendors to qualify the interoperability of their products with Unified CVP. Such certification
is part of the Cisco Technology Developer Program—for more information see 

Media Server

The Media Server is a simple web server, such as Microsoft IIS or Apache. Its only purpose
within Unified CVP is to store and serve up .wav files to the VXML Gateway, as required in
order to render VXML pages. As with ASR/TTS Servers, Media Servers can be deployed singly,
as a redundant pair, or with CSS in a farm.

Note that the VXML Gateway caches .wav files it retrieves from the Media Server. In most
deployments, the Media Server encounters extremely low traffic from Unified CVP.

Cisco Unified CallManager

This is Cisco’s IP-based PBX. It is used to manage and switch VoIP calls among IP phones.
When combined with Unified ICME it becomes Unified CCE.

Unified CVP interacts with Unified CallManager primarily as a means for sending
PSTN-originated calls to Unified CCE agents. However, several applications require that calls
be originated by Unified CCE agents instead. Specifically, Cisco Unified Outbound Option
when used with Unified CCE, and calls that are being warm-consultative-transferred from one
agent to another, are originated in this way. "Help desk" calls, in which an agent or other IP
phone user calls Unified CVP (or calls a skill group and gets queued on Unified CVP), also fall
into this category.

A single Unified CallManager can originate and receive calls from both SIP and H.323 devices.

Gatekeeper

The Gatekeeper is the focus for high availability design in the H.323 protocol arena, and it is
only used in Unified CVP implementations that use H.323 for call control. Like the SIP Proxy
Server, it mixes directory lookup services with load balancing and failover capabilities, producing
fault tolerance among H.323 endpoints. Unlike the SIP Proxy Server, control messages do not
pass through it to target endpoints; the paradigm is instead that of a request/response server.

Planning Guide for Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal 4.0(1)