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Cisco Personal Assistant 1.4 Installation and Administration Guide
OL-4590-03
Chapter 1 Planning for Personal Assistant
Understanding the Personal Assistant Server and Speech-Recognition Server
For specific items, such as user names in the corporate directory, the grammar is generated and
automatically compiled during the system refresh (see the “Configuring Speech Recognition” section on
page 4-4). As new users are added to the directory, their names are automatically recognized after the
refresh.
Personal Assistant Server
The Personal Assistant server manages the interaction between the user and Personal Assistant,
processes call routing and dial rules, and manages the overall configuration of the Personal Assistant
system.
You must install the Personal Assistant server during installation, and you manage its functions and
processes from the administrator web-based interface (see the “Logging On to and Out of the
Personal Assistant Administration Interface” section on page 4-3 for information about accessing the
interface).
You can have more than one Personal Assistant server configured. In fact, you should do this if you want
to provide failover protection (see the “Creating Server Clusters” section on page 1-10 for details).
License and Resource Managers
The license and resource managers are subcomponents of the Personal Assistant server; they are
installed with it. However, they actually work in conjunction with the speech-recognition and
Personal Assistant servers. Although the license manager and resource managers provide different
services, they are closely linked, in that every system that functions as a license manager also functions
as a resource manager.
License Manager
The license manager maintains the license for the speech-recognition software. The speech-recognition
servers work only if there is at least one active license manager with a valid license. Although every
Personal Assistant server includes a license manager, not every Personal Assistant server needs an active
license manager.
You only need one license manager within a single Personal Assistant server cluster, although Cisco
recommends that you define two license managers for redundancy.
Resource Manager
The resource manager manages the interaction between the Personal Assistant server cluster and the
speech-recognition servers in the speech-recognition server cluster. Although every Personal Assistant
server includes a resource manager, only one resource manager is used as the active connection between
the Personal Assistant server cluster and the speech-recognition server cluster. Personal Assistant
automatically chooses the resource manager to be used, and if that manager becomes disabled, another
resource manager takes over.
Once a resource manager establishes a connection between a Personal Assistant server and an available
speech-recognition server for a particular call, the Personal Assistant server and speech-recognition
server interact directly for the duration of that call. The resource manager is not a permanent
communication link between the servers.
The resource manager does not manage communication between Personal Assistant servers;
Personal Assistant servers communicate directly.