Configuring & Licensing Speech Services on Avaya IR 2.0

Transcription

1 Summary This paper intends to document & summarize standard licensing configurations with respect to natural language speech recognition & synthesis on IR2.0. It also captures how licenses on the speech servers are engaged by various proxies that are supported on the IR system. It is required that the reader has a degree of understanding of IR platform, the speech servers, VoiceXML and TAS applications. Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 1 of 12

2 Copyright 2006, Avaya Inc. All rights reserved. Avaya and the Avaya Logo are trademarks of Avaya Inc. All trademarks identified by and are registered trademarks or trademarks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. Solaris is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The information provided in this document is subject to change without notice. The configurations, technical data, and recommendations provided in this document are believed to be accurate and dependable at the time of publication, but are presented without express or implied warranty. Users are responsible for their application of any products specified in this document. For the latest version of this document, visit the Avaya customer support website at support.avaya.com. Version History Issue Date Description Jun-06 Initial version for IR2.0. Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 2 of 12

3 Contents I. Licensing IR2.0 (RTU vs. LM) II. Licensing the Speech Servers III. Configuring Speech Recognition & Synthesis IV. Rules of Engagement - I (TAS vs. VoiceXML) V. Rules of Engagement - II (Native vs. MRCP) VI. Tools VII. Troubleshooting Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 3 of 12

4 I. Licensing on IR2.0 With IR2.0, RTUquery is no longer available. If you have upgraded from IR1.3 to IR2.0, you could use 'RTUquery.old' to check the number of licenses you had previously configured. IR2.0 uses enterprise licensing (WebLM) that can be shared across IR2.0 installations & also provides backup, failover & redundancy to some extent. The standard way is through use of a local WebLM server through installing the AVweblm package, that shares the Tomcat installation of AVwebadm (a base package). Just remember to restart (stop & start) Tomcat. irv240dev5(root)# pwd /export/optional_features irv240dev5(root)# pkgadd -d. AVweblm... irv240dev5(root)# /etc/init.d/tomcat stop... irv240dev5(root)# /etc/init.d/tomcat start... Next, point your browser to the WebLM server (eg: & provision your RFA license file. The username & password for the first time login is admin & weblmadmin. You could check the number of licenses made available by clicking on Licensed Products > VSS > Interactive_Response. You will also need to point IR to this URL for licenses (WebAdmin: Configuration Management > License Configurations > Primary WebLM Server URL). Now, you can use licensequery to check for the licenses available: irv240dev5(root)# licensequery -all Feature Lic Primary Secondary Feature Type Val Tot Free Tot Free Name VALUE_IR_ASR_PORTS *S Advanced Speech Recognition VALUE_IR_TTS_PORTS *S Text To Speech (Speech Synthesis) VALUE_IR_PORTS *S Digital and Voice Over IP VALUE_IR_SNMP *S Simple Network Management Protocol FAX 0 Fax WW 60 Whole Word Recognition DPR 240 Dial Pulse Recognition *S: Secondary WebLM server is not configured Use the -all switch to also display the number of licenses that will be required on the IR system (Lic Val column). Note that the numbers of licenses for WW & DPR are fixed and depends on the type of machine and the number of CPUs, whereas, that for FAX would be determined by the type of board that the system has and the availability of AVnms. Unlike IR1.3, where the RTUs & the number of ports/channels configured are independent of eachother, in IR2.0, the number of licenses that a system requires and that it tries to fetch from the WebLM LicenseServer will be as many as those that are configured. The license manager uses the script get_ports.sh to get these values. Thus, if you have 96 channels configured, along with 96 ASR & TTS ports altogether each, the LM will try to fetch 96 licenses for digital & VoIP channels (distribute it first amongst digital cards & then through VoIP), and 96 each for ASR & TTS. These licenses are renewed about every 10 minutes & the IR system will run in normal or grace mode depending on the number of licenses it has just acquired & those it had acquired previously. {runwith = min (required, max (just-acquired, previouslyacquired)) } Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 4 of 12

5 II. Licensing the Speech Servers a. OpenSpeech Recognizer The license file goes in the folder flexlm\license folder of the OSR installation on MS Windows and is installed using osr-lic.bat (confirm the filename in the batchfile). The service OSR Licensing Service needs to be started thereafter. OSR uses two types of licenses osr_swirec & osr_swiep, and are provided in equal numbers by the vendor. One of each type are checked out when requesting a recognition using MRCP, whereas when using the client-server model through Avosr204 only the osr_swirec type is checked out. These licenses are tied to the physical address. Note: One can run either the OSR Licensing Service, or the RealSpeak Licensing Service on a single machine, never both. If one needs to run both OSR & RS on the same machine, their licenses needs to be combined and be used with the service that is running. In these cases, it is best to deselect and not install one (say RealSpeak) licensing service right at the time of installation, else, keep the service disabled. OSR can also be loaded on Linux. b. RealSpeak Like OSR, the license file need to be placed under the folder flexlm\license folder of the RS installation on MS Windows 2000 and installed using the rs-lic.bat (confirm the filename in the batchfile). The service RealSpeak Licensing Service should be started thereafter. The vendor provides the license files that are tied to the machine s physical address and are per language. Please refer to the note above. c. Speechify Like OSR & RS, Speechify license file goes under flexlm\license folder of the Speechify installation and is installed using the speechify-lic.bat file. The service Speechify Licensing Service should be started thereafter. The vendor provides license files that are tied ot the machine s physical address & are per language. What holds true in the note above, also extends to Speechify licensing. d. Nuance 8.5 with NPC 3.7 Again, the license (here it is just a 30 character string) is provided by the vendor on the MAC address. This string needs to be passed to the Nuance License Manager (nlm) as a parameter directly, or through a file. It can either be placed in the watcher.startup file when using the Nuance Watcher Daemon, or be provided to the nlm in the runnlm.bat file. e. Vocalizer 4.0 The Vocalizer license is a file that too needs to be provided to an instance of the nlm. The nlm can run multiple licenses, so you can either include your Vocalizer license on the same nlm command line of your Nuance System license key, or you can start a separate nlm specifically for Vocalizer. f. Nuance MRCP Server 1.0 It does not need any kind of licensing, it is indirectly met by Nuance 8.5 & Vocalizer licensing. g. SpeechWorks Media Server SWMS does not need any kind of licensing, it is indirectly met by OSR & RS licensing. h. WebSphere Voice Server The IBM WebSphere Voice Server does not provide any licensing of its own and relies on our Proxy licenses. For further information, please refer to the documentation at IBM WebSphere Voice Server Information Center. Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 5 of 12

6 III. Configuring Speech Recognition & Synthesis As it was with IR1.3, in IR2.0 speech recognition & synthesis can be configured through Feature Packages > Speech and DPR Administration > Administration on the administrative web pages. First a recognition/synthesizer type needs to be selected (VoiceXML apps use OPSR4), and then the type of engine that one intends to use. The mrcp-type connection, though uses the same package & proxies, is further classified into four types to allow for ease of configuration. To manually configure the server uri/port, use the type mrcp-other. Please refer to the compatibility matrix for Scansoft, Nuance & IBM to get the products & their correct versions supported. All the configurations are stored in files under /vs/sproxy/cfg on the IR machine and can be carefully edited if required. When using MRCP, the configuration file /vs/sproxy/cfg/mrcp.cfg allows fine tuning of parameters related to MRCP. Of note is the PerPortConnection key which indicates if the MRCP implementation is using one connection for all MRCP signaling or a connection for each ASR/TTS port. When using IBM WVS 5.1.3, this parameter needs to be set to true, since it needs a separate connection for each port. It can be set to false with SWMS 3.1.9, so that a single connection could be used for all signaling, and have all the heartbeat activity streamlined. Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 6 of 12

7 IV. Rules of Engagement - I (TAS vs. VoiceXML) Avaya IR supports two kinds of voice response applications TAS and VoiceXML. TAS Transaction Assembler Script (TAS) is an assembly-type instruction language consisting of a sequence of instruction calls run within the generic TSM software that manages the low-level interactions required to operate the system. At any time, TAS can be used to assemble, load, change, or replace a script without affecting the other scripts running on TSM or other IRAPI programs running the system. TAS applications can be created using the Avaya IVR Designer tool. The transaction state machine (TSM) software process is an IRAPI application that manages the execution of TAS language applications. A prerequisite to creating and deploying TAS applications for NLSR is creating the required vendor specific NLSR grammars. In a typical NLSR application, external functions are used to allocate recognition resources on the remote server (allocproxy) and release them when the application is finished with them (deallocproxy). Thus, the control over when the resources are allocated and engaged lies within the application itself & can be fine tuned. If the resources are reserved only for a small duration of the entire call, the ratio of number of ASR ports to the number of channels could be reduced, i.e. one could have a lesser number of ASR ports than channels, and have them shared between channels. However, the risk here is that one could potentially run out of resources in the middle of a call! A safer way out is to reserve the ASR resource right in the beginning of the call and keep it available right through it. Compared to recognition, speech synthesis is a much more straightforward process and less CPU intensive too. The allocation and release of synthesizer resources is transparent to the application. A call to say/talk() containing the text to be synthesized is all it takes. This will internally take care of proxy allocation and release, usually immediately surrounding the call with a bit of optimization. VoiceXML IR2.0 also supports VoiceXML 2.0. VoiceXML is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations. Its major goal is to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications. This application could even have been dynamically generated through an application server. Now it s the Common AVB (Avaya Voice Browser) along with a platform dependent & IRAPI aware layer that does the parsing and interpretation of a VoiceXML application. The language does not require document authors to explicitly allocate and deallocate dialog resources, or deal with concurrency. Resource allocation and concurrent threads of control are to be handled by the implementation platform, in our case, the CommonAVB. Thus, for recognition, the CommonAVB allocates a resource right at the beginning of the call, such that it is available throughout the call if need be. And, it is released only at the end of the document flow. This mandates a 1:1 ratio for the number of channels to the number of recognizer ports. Note: The key client.rec.asrresource in /vs/data/vxml/defaults[0-5].cfg on an AIR system controls if an ASR resource is allocated by the respective voice xml interpreter (at the beginning of the application flow). The value for this key should be VXIInteger 4. Setting this to -1, one could choose not to automatically allocate an ASR resource, like for applications that use only touch tones. The TTS continues to remain straightforward, with resource allocation and deallocation by the CommonAVB done just-in-time when a synthesis is required. It is further optimized to keep the resource allocated in case of an immediate need for another TTS service, i.e. we allocate a resource at the beginning of the <form> & deallocate it at the end (</form>) when we exit it, unless that form leads to another that too requires synthesis. Thus, if a vxml application has multiple <form>s, TTS proxy allocation/deallocation happens multiple times, depending on the flow. This allows for a lower TTS port to channels ratio, i.e. a lesser number of TTS ports compared to the number of channels. The exact ratio that could be used depends on the proportion of time spent on synthesis in an application & is based on experience with the application over a period of time. Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 7 of 12

8 V. Rules of Engagement - II (Native vs. MRCP) Please refer to the compatibility matrix for Scansoft, Nuance & IBM to get the products & their correct versions supported. As in the diagram above, the MRCP server abstracts the recognizer & the synthesizer from the AIR platform, and the licenses are indirectly checked out by the respective MRCP servers, which can even cache instances of recognizers & synthesizers to further optimize performance. a. OpenSpeech Recognizer with AVosr204 b. RealSpeak with nuan-rs4010-proxy c. Speechify with AVspw301 These integrations follow the same rule as described in section IV, TAS vs. VXML, viz. the TTS licenses are checked out per request & SR licenses are checked out when the proxies are allocated, which happens at call answer for vxml apps. d. Nuance 8.5 with NPC 3.7 As soon as the voice system is started on the IR2.0 system, the NPC 3.7 checks out as many licenses on the Nuance 8.5 system as the number of ports that are configured for the ASR proxy. e. Vocalizer 4.0 with NUANvtpxy 1.1 Vocalizer allows you the option of having all licenses allocated at startup or having them allocated as they are required. By default, licenses are granted on a per request basis. To enable preallocation of licenses, include the option -preallocate_licenses on the command line. f. Nuance 8.5 with AVmrcpasr using Nuance MRCP Server 1.0 g. Vocalizer 4.0 with AVmrcptts using Nuance MRCP Server 1.0 Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 8 of 12

9 When connecting through MRCP, the licenses are engaged only for the duration the resource is allocated. They follow the same rule as described in section IV, viz. the TTS licenses are checked out per request & SR licenses are checked out when the resources are allocated, which happens at call answer for vxml apps. h. OpenSpeech Recognizer with AVmrcpasr using SWMS i. RealSpeak with AVmrcptts using SWMS MRCP integration too follows the rules stated previously for VoiceXML. Further, the SWMS also caches instances of OSR & RS to optimize performance. This result in an apparent delay in the release of licenses on completion of a request, however, the server instances are actually available to service any requests coming in. j. IBM WebSphere Voice Server with AVmrcpasr & AVmrcptts The IBM WebSphere Voice Server does not use any kind of licensing of its own and relies on the licensing of IR2.0 system s ASR & TTS proxies. The table below summarizes when exactly the vendor licenses get engaged during a call flow on an IR2.0 system: system activation call answer first use of resource finish first use of resource call disconnect system deactivation OSR AVosr OSR SWMS AVmrcpasr + - Nuance NPC Nuance MRCP Server AVmrcpasr + - TAS-TTS VXML-SR VXML-TTS Speechify + AVspw RS nuan-rs4010-proxy + - RS SWMS AVmrcptts + - Vocalizer NUANvtpxy Vocalizer NUANvtpxy Vocalizer MRCP Server AVmrcpasr OSR AVosr OSR SWMS AVmrcpasr + - Nuance NPC Nuance MRCP Server AVmrcpasr Speechify + AVspw RS nuan-rs4010-proxy + - RS SWMS AVmrcptts + - Vocalizer NUANvtpxy Vocalizer NUANvtpxy Vocalizer MRCP Server AVmrcpasr Allocation & release determined at application level. Preferred way is to do it just-in-time. If started with the switch -preallocate_licenses, it will allocate all licenses at its startup. Not a part of the official compatibility matrix. + The vendor license gets engaged.... The vendor license remains engaged. - The vendor license gets released. Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 9 of 12

10 VI. Tools AVB Logs The AVB/VXI log levels could be changed from Configuration Management > VXML Log Administration > VXML Logging Level in the administrative web pages. Note that with IR2.0 running just logcat will display only error & fatal logs from VXI! One would need to use the log-prefix option using -l (lower case L ). Valid log-prefixes are: vxi_i, vxi_w, vxi_e, vxi_f, vxi_d, vxi_p, vxi_l for info, warning, error, fatal, debug, performance & application logs respectively. These flags cannot be OR ed! ASR logs TTS logs Increase the log levels using sproxyadm -D 5 -r SR, and then collect traces using trace ASRPROXYMGR. Increase the log level using sproxyadm -D 5 -r TTS, and then collect traces using trace VROP. Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 10 of 12

11 VII. Troubleshooting Logs to look for when: the right ASR proxy package is not installed The logcat output will say if srproxy was not able to load the proxy library dynamically. The output would be similar to this: * Mon May 8 12:22: ASRPROXYMGR../ASRProxyMgr.c:171 PROXY (PX_GENERAL_FAILURE) ASRProxyMgr OPSR4-1 Failure: Unable to add proxy OPSR4, dlopen: ld.so.1: /vs/bin/vrs/srproxy: fatal: /vs/sproxy/lib/mrcpasrproxy.so: open failed: No such file or directory the ASR proxy is not configured correctly sproxyadm d -r SR will show the ports FOOS. The reason could be further checked in the logcat output or the traces. For eg: an incorrectly configured URI for the MRCP server will show FOOS in sproxyadm output & trace ASRPROXYMGR will show heartbeat received, however will say that an error is received from the server. 05/08 16:59:01:442 ASRPROXYMGR[005]: Recvd: heartbeat/connect resp (DESCRIBE) proxy:opsr4 file:.. 05/08 16:59:01:442 /RtspConnection.c line:247 05/08 16:59:01:442 ASRPROXYMGR[005]: Receive error from server proxy:opsr4 file:../rtspconnection 05/08 16:59:01:442.c line:260 the ASR proxy could not be allocated because of any one of the following reasons: o lack of available ports o lack of licenses on IR2.0 o lack of licenses on the speech server For eg: running out of ASR ports will result in the following log in logcat: * Mon May 8 17:03: ASRPROXYMGR../ASRProxy.c:320 PROXY (PX_GENERAL_FAILURE) OPSR4-1 Failure: Unable to alloc resource for channel 1 ** Mon May 8 17:03: AVAYAVXI1 *:0 AVB (AVB_ERROR) Error: [Platform] [TID:7] [CID:1] [error] [496ms] CIRChannelImpl::RecSessionBegin() ASR allocation failed. Received IRE_INPUT_DONE ** Mon May 8 17:03: AVAYAVXI1 *:0 AVB (AVB_ERROR) Error: [Platform] [TID:7] [CID:1] [error] [556ms] OSBrecUriASR::Init(): Channel number = 1 or invalid ASR! ** Mon May 8 17:03: AVAYAVXI1 *:0 AVB (AVB_ERROR) Error: [Rec] [TID:7] [CID:1] [error] [556ms] Failed to create grammar from URI: builtin:grammar/digits?length=2 Return code = 23 the ASR proxy fails after a successful allocation There could be various reasons for this. One will need to check both logcat & trace output for this. Logs to look for when: the right TTS proxy package is not installed The logcat output will say if vrop_tng was not able to load the proxy library dynamically. The output would be similar to: ** Mon May 8 17:24: VROP_TNG../TTSProxyMgr.c:162 TTS (TTS_ADDFAIL) Source: TTSProxyMgr::_addProxy Reason: Unable to add proxy TTS0, dlopen: ld.so.1: /vs/bin/vrs/vrop_tng: fatal: /vs/sproxy/lib/mrcpttsproxy.so: open failed: No such file or directory TTS proxy is not configured correctly Note that in these cases, the logs are a bit cryptic! (Please look forward to IR3.0! :) For eg: the message in logcat in case of an incorrect MRCP server URI would be the following: ** Mon May 8 17:19: VROP_TNG../TTSProxyMgr.c:552 Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 11 of 12

12 TTS (TTS_NORESOURCE) No port available, Source: TTSProxyMgr::allocPort Reason: Specified resource type not supported the TTS proxy could not be allocated because of o lack of freely available ports o lack of licenses on IR2.0 o lack of licenses on the speech server ** Mon May 8 17:15: VROP_TNG../TTSProxyMgr.c:552 TTS (TTS_NORESOURCE) No port available, Source: TTSProxyMgr::allocPort Reason: Specified resource type not supported the TTS proxy fails after a successful allocation This could be due to a variety of reasons. One will need to check both logcat & trace outputs. [ End ] Issue 1.0, June 2006 Avaya Inc Pg 12 of 12