Emerging Tech Talk #016 – The Three Pools of Tools for Voice Application Developers
January 16th, 2009 by Dan YorkWhat are the different types of tools out there for developers of voice/communications applications? What choices do developers have? And where does Voxeo’s recent acquisition of VoiceObjects fit within the range of tools?
In this episode, host Dan York talks about the “three pools of tools” for developers of voice applications and the options that developers have available when considering how to build a voice application.
You can download or play the podcast here:
Emerging Tech Talk #016 - The Three Pools of Tools for Voice Application Developers [10:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadOr you can watch on YouTube at:
Now there are certainly other ways to slice up and categorize the tools out there for developers, and if you have your own or disagree with my categorizations, please do feel free to leave a comment here.
If you enjoyed this show, please consider one (or more) of these options:
- subscribing via iTunes
- subscribing to our YouTube account (if you are a YouTube user)
- subscribing to our RSS feed
- following us on Twitter
- following us on FriendFeed
Thank you.
This Voxeo podcast can be found on the web at http://blogs.voxeo.com/ett. If you have comments or feedback about this show, you can either leave comments here on the show blog site or email Dan York.
Technorati Tags: dan york, danyork, emerging communications, emerging tech talk, emerging technology, emergingtechtalk, ett, voice, voip, voxeo, developers, apis, voicexml, xml, programming
Related posts:
- Emerging Tech Talk #010 – Voxeo acquires VoiceObjects and brings developers new voice application tools
- Emerging Tech Talk #23 – Irv Shapiro of IfByPhone on making voice app development easier
- Emerging Tech Talk #013 – Thomas Howe on Voice Mashups and Voice-enabling Business Processes
- Emerging Tech Talk #26 – Intro to Tropo.com – eComm 209
- Emerging Tech Talk #30 – Voxeo and Trade Harbor partner on voice authentication
Tags: Applications, Development, ETT, Voxeo
If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.
RSS Feed
January 17th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Nice summary.
How would you characterize using the dialplan in Asterisk to build voice apps? (I know more and more people are using this approach to building IVRs, and I’m not sure it fits clearly into any of the three pools.)
I guess the dialplan syntax could be described as a call control / dialog language, or perhaps even as an abstraction layer sitting on top of the asterisk core (does this qualify as an API). There are also lots of tools for developing apps at a higher level than the dialplan itself (phpAGI, Adhearsion, etc.)
So which pool would Asterisk go into?
January 19th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Mark,
Thanks for your kind words.
So… where would editing the Asterisk dialplan fit in to my categorization? Well… I’m not sure that it would. If you were using AGI scripts, or phpAGI or Adhearsion or so on, those would fit into my “API Telephony” category (and in fact in my initial recording I mentioned them but had to cut them to get the show under 10 minutes).
But direct editing of the dialplan? (Which I have done myself to do a basic IVR.) I guess I would think of that as more just kind of directly provisioning an IVR within a PBX. If you had a PBX from someone else (Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Mitel, ShoreTel, etc.) they all generally provide interfaces through which you can create basic IVR flows or basic auto-attendants. Usually those are graphical user interfaces of some sort, but ultimately they are usually modifying some file on disk. By editing the Asterisk dialplan, you are just cutting out the GUI (although I realize Asterisk admin GUIs are plentiful) and going directly into the base config file. It’s not really “tool-based”, although with a GUI you might be able to call it that.
Is it even an “API”? I’m not sure I’d really call it that… it’s more direct manipulation of the server itself. Now AGI/phpAGI/Adhearsion/etc. are all very definitely APIs and, in my mind, fit nicely into what I called “API-based telephony.”
Thanks for the comment, Dan