Voxeo announces COBOL support for Tropo.com voice app platform
April 1st, 2009 by Dan York
Orlando, FL – APRIL 1, 2009 — Today Voxeo, the world’s leading provider of standards-based voice application platforms and hosted services, announced it has provided new, enhanced fuctionality for its Tropo.com voice application platform. The current platform, which allows developers to create voice applications using programming languages such as Ruby, Python, Javacript, Groovy and PHP, will now also have a COBOL interface.
According to Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo, “Despite the popularity of other languages, COBOL still has more installed lines of code than any other software language. Banks, utilities, and other large corporations depend on COBOL for their billing and operations. By offering a COBOL interface to voice and speech technology, legacy programs can immediately become voice-enabled without any further effort.”
The COBOL interface will allow companies to make and receive telephone calls, use recorded audio or text-to-speech to speak to callers, and use speech recognition or DTMF to receive responses from customers. The interface adheres to COBOL-85, with optional updates to COBOL 2002 for advanced users.
The COBOL interface, like the ones in other languages, uses a few simple extra keywords to provide a speech interface. Voxeo CTO R.J. Auburn states that COBOL’s expressive style is uniquely suited to speech applications. “Unlike other languages, COBOL encourages a more natural, human-oriented approach to writing programs. In COBOL, it’s easy to program statements such as ‘CALL YOUR MOTHER’ or ‘SAY HOW MUCH IT COSTS.’”
Developers can test the new COBOL interface and sign up for free accounts at Tropo.com. Support for additional languages will be added throughout 2009 with FORTRAN and ALGOL currently being among the top candidates.
Voxeo is an employee-owned company with headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne and London. The company’s Prophecy Platform has been downloaded more than 30,000 times since its launch in 2006 and its standards-based IVR/voice hosting platform is the largest in the world and the only one backed by a 100% uptime guarantee. For more information visit www.voxeo.com or call +1 (407) 418-1800 or +44 (0) 20 7887 6085 in the UK and Europe.
See also our video explanation of the announcement.
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Technorati Tags: tropo, voxeo, voice, cobol
Related posts:
- Rounding up the coverage of the Tropo COBOL launch
- Thanks to all who helped with our COBOL for Tropo April 1 news
- Introducing Tropo… a new way to develop voice applications in languages you already know…
- Slides from Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn’s talk at VoiceCon about mashups and Tropo.com
- Join the Tropo developer community – via Forums, IRC or Skype
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April 1st, 2009 at 7:51 am
[...] In this special April 1st edition, host Dan York announces the addition of support for the COBOL language to Voxeo’s Tropo.com voice application platform and explains the rationale behind it. This new COBOL support was announced earlier today in a Tropo blog post. [...]
April 1st, 2009 at 9:12 am
[...] 1 tags: cobol, tropo, tropo.com, voice apps, voxeo by jasongoecke Following on the heels of Voxeo’s announcement of support for COBOL in their recently released Tropo.com platform, I have put together a script [...]
April 1st, 2009 at 7:20 pm
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