Billing in VoiceXML 2.0 - a deliberate lacuna?

Hi,

In the pre-1.0 specifications, there was the tiniest hint via "cost", an
attribute, that *could* have been a precursor to something more flexible in
the coming releases
for billing and charging for calls.

Whereas the ETSI specifications in CS-1 onwards provide for billing and
charging operations that can be used in a service, I have not seen yet a way
to
charge a caller based on:

(a) Contents of the VoiceXML page (premium / non-premium)
(b) Size of the page
(c) System resource usage (announcements via pre-recorded audio or TTS,
speech recognition, size of grammars for such ASR etc.)
(d) Call transfers (two aspects - 1. charges for transfers to a non-toll
free number and 2. blocking system resources for bridged transfer with call
resumption possibility)  

Any plans in the future to address these? In comparison, the CS-1 has a
whole appendix dedicated to billing and charging and at least two different
ways
for an application to create charging records per call. The contents of the
records are in the hand of the application.

Thanks,
Ranjan Sharma

Received on Thursday, 3 January 2002 09:31:11 UTC