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Their goal is to better enable contact centers to do their work without a live customer service representative in the mix.

Both technology titans have voice recognition middleware products on the market. The new agreement will integrate Cisco's technology into IBM's middleware.

"Cisco has a strong voice portal product, and also has VoIP technology that, combined with WebSphere middleware, will create a good match for contact centers," said Eugene Cox, director of IBM's contact-center solutions.

Voice recognition allows a computer to fulfill the role of several hundred human representatives. Implementations of the new technology will let customers do things like reserve a hotel room or change their cellphone plan interactively.

To further encourage the development of speech-oriented technologies, IBM donated $10 million worth of its software to the open source community.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.