Altitude Scripting Language concepts

Altitude Scripting Language (ASL) is an application language, designed towards the contact center domain. ASL achieves business goals by interacting with a customer or an agent while coordinating with the telephony switch, email servers, SQL databases, the Altitude uCI Server, and the operating system.

Script

A script is a text file written in ASL, that runs on specific applications, and provides an interface between an agent and a customer. For example, in a campaign selling a product.

Structure

Scripts are text files, and the extension of the file distinguishes between the different types of scripts and modules. Script Developer is the application that developers use to develop ASL scripts.

Scripts are structured as a set of possible steps called nodes. For example, nodes can do the following:

• Prompt the agent using a graphical window, reacting to clicks and entered text.
• Prompt the customer using voice, reacting to digits and spoken text.
• Try to route a call, and react to routing outcomes.

Each node defines a set of event handlers to perform initialization and finalization or to react to specific events such as input from the user, a telephony event, or a timeout.

Finally, the script defines two global handlers that initialize and terminate the script. The initialization must explicitly move the conversation to the first node.

Node inheritance, subroutines, and functions avoid the repetition of code among similar nodes and among event handlers.

Special facilities

Scripts automatically receive contact data from the Altitude uCI Server database when the contact is identified. In particular, the contact data provides the phone numbers that the Altitude uCI Server dials, but the contact data typically includes relevant contact and business data such as name, address, demographics, and so on. When the script ends, the script can update the contact data or create a new contact.

Scripts can explore the CTI (computer-telephony integration) provided by the Altitude uCI Server to monitor the state of calls and react to telephony events. In particular, scripts can transfer data with calls. Agents receiving calls with data have the context of the call and do not need to repeat the same questions to the contact.

Scripts can easily access the Altitude uCI Server database or a business database, which is implemented on top of a regular SQL database.

Scripts can run Windows applications, use Windows DLLs, and use web services to interact with existing information systems.

Standard facilities

ASL includes many features found in standard languages, such as:

• Simple types, for example, boolean, number, text, date, time, and datetime.
• Composite types, like records and arrays.
• Type coercion.
• Constants with global and local scope.
• Variables with global and local scope, initialized with the null value or with a constant expression.
• Built-in functions that manipulate text, dates, and times.
• Conditional statements (if and case) and conditional expression (if).
• Iterative statements (while, repeat, for).
• Subroutines and functions.