Voxeo Developer’s Corner

In a very cool demonstration of what you can do with the IMified platform, you can now use either IM or Twitter to find out the status of bills in the New York state senate.

Shortly after we announced the acquisition of IMified, independent developer Mark Headd let us know he was excited to give it a try for some of the “open government” projects he works on and documents on his VOX POPULI blog. On June 18th, he put up a great example: Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API where you can simply send a Jabber/GoogleTalk IM message to:

opensenate@bot.im

with a New York Senate bill number in it and get back the status of that bill.

When we added Twitter support to IMified last week, Mark quickly added a Twitter ID to his service so that now you can simply send a Twitter “@” message to “@opensenate” with the same kind of request. You can see some of the interaction so far on the twitter.com/opensenate page.

Mark has nicely made available in his blog post the sample PHP code for his IMified bot. Mark has also been exchanging comments with Nathan Freitas from the New York Senate CIO team. It’s very cool to see that Mark was the very first external user of the NY Senate API. (Congrats, Mark!)

It’s all great work and we’re pleased to see what Mark has done with the platform.

Two other comments:

1. I was not personally aware of this NY Senate openness initiative, but from this article, “5 Open tenets of the new NYSenate.gov“, it sounds like some excellent work. (Note to NH state gov’t: can I get access like this, too, please?)

2. How great is it to have the NY Senate CIO office posting their open source code and API documentation on Github! Great to see.

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Technorati Tags: ny, nysenate, open, open government, government, voxeo, imified

SIPoint Presence Server is an integrated SIP Registrar, Proxy, Presence and XCAP server. It supports most key SIP standards as well as SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leverage Extensions.

Because of its integrated capabilities, it is very easy to use SIPoint to create a simple SIP switch for softphones like X-Lite to support voice, instant messaging, and presence.

System Overview

Here is how the system looks like. Bob, Alice, and John’s soft-phones are all connected to SIPoint via the local network within the same domain. For this example, let’s call the domain is example.com.

SIPoint Configuration

SIPoint has to be configured to manage the example.com domain. Here are the step-by-step instructions.

• Download SIPoint Installer from Micromethod website if you haven’t done so.
• Install SIPoint on a server (Linux/Windows/Mac) that is on a LAN with all the softphones.
• Start SIPoint by running startup.[sh | bat] from where SIPoint is installed. If this is the first time you run SIPoint, SIPoint should automatically populate its embedded database with all the default configurations.
• Now you should be able to access SIPoint’s Management Console at http://localhost:8080 from the server where SIPoint is installed. You log in with default name and password - admin/admin.
• The initial page of SIPoint’s Web Management Console gives you the system information.

  

• Click the node to get the general server configuration, including the default domains SIPoint manages. Add “example.com” to the list of Responsible Domains and select it as the default domain, as shown in the picture below. Please make sure you click the button to add the domain and click the button to make the changes persisted.

  

Softphone Configuration

Now you can configure the SIP-based softphones. Please note that softphones have to support SIMPLE in order to use the presence and instant messaging features. Regardless the SIMPLE support, voice communication should work as long as the softphones are RFC 3261 compliant.

Each softphone should be configured to use SIPoint as the default SIP Registrar and Proxy. Here is how you configure the X-Lite softphone on John’s machine.

• Configure the SIP account for John as the following. Please note the names are case sensitive.

  

• Configure the Presence to use Presence Agent mode.

  

• Add Bob (or Alice) as one of your contacts as the following. Make sure you enable “Show contact’s Availability” to enable presence.

  

Similarly you can configure Bob and Alice’s softphones and add the appropriate contacts.

Now you have a small SIP network with SIPoint Server as the switch. John, Bob, and Alice should be able to call and send instant messages to each other and see the other people’s presence.

Want to know how to build an outbound dialing app with VoiceObjects? Would you like to learn how to add call control capabilities to applications you build with VoiceObjects?

If so, please join us for our next Developer Jam Session on:

Wednesday, June 24, 2009
8am US Pacific, 11am Eastern, 5pm Central European Time

In this webinar, Tobias Göbel will discuss implementing call control in VoiceObjects applications. The abstract is:

VoiceXML has rather limited capabilities in the area of call control, basically restricting the scope to blind or bridged tranfers. This Jam session will introduce CCXML and explain how it can interact with VoiceObjects applications to build advanced voice services including both call control and voice automation. Examples include outbound dialing, two-party bridging, call whisper, and multi-party conferences. Demo code will be provided so that participants can test the applications themselves using the free downloads of Voxeo´s Prophecy platform and VoiceObjects phone application server.

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Technorati Tags: ccxml, voiceobjects, voxeo, voicexml

If you’ve taken the plunge and started developing an IM bot using IMified (perhaps the python example for Google App Engine?), you may of course find yourself wanting to ask some questions about the IMified API or other questions about how your app can work with the service. To help you out, the IMified team recently rolled out a new help system at the intuitive URL of:

http://help.imified.com/

Feel free to go there and post whatever questions you have about developing on the IMified platform.

And if you haven’t started trying out the IMified platform, why not sign up for a free developer account and give it a try?

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Technorati Tags: im, imified

This week Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn spoke out at the JavaOne conference on the topic of “Taking a SIP of Java“. RJ’s slides are now available on SlideShare at:

http://www.slideshare.net/voxeo/javaone-a-sip-of-java-rj-auburn

And the presentation, also embedded below, looks to be a classic RJ kind of talk… fun, lively, interesting… and also with some code. I don’t know if there were any recordings made, but if there were I’ll update the article with a link. Enjoy the talk!

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Technorati Tags: java, sip, sip servlets, sipmethod, voxeo, rjauburn

As you may have noticed last week, we announced the acquisition of a company called IMified and with that we brought in more opportunities and options for developers. Now you can create instant messaging “bots” (or “agents” or whatever you want to call them) that allow you to create applications that interact with users via IM. (More about what you can do with IMified in the acquisition announcement.)

Developer accounts are free over on www.imified.com. Please do sign up and check it out. We’d love to hear what you think of the service. (And you can safely assume that we’ll be evolving the service and adding more to it over the months ahead.)

One aspect of IMified that is a bit different from either Voxeo’s Evolution XML developer portal or our Tropo.com site is that with IMified you do need to host your application on a web server somewhere. With both Evolution and Tropo, you can host your application on your own server and simply point Evolution or Tropo to the URL of your app, but there is also the option with both services of hosting your apps directly within our hosted infrastructure. With IMified you do need to host your application somewhere and then provide the URL inside IMified when configuring your bot.

The beautiful thing about this, of course, is that it means you can write the bot application in whatever language you want on whatever operating system you want and using whatever tools you want. All your application has to do is use the IMified API to communicate with the IMified platform.

One place developers can host a web services app these days is certainly Google App Engine, and the IMified team just posted a knowledge base article showing an example bot in python hosted on Google App Engine. Courtesy of an IMified user named Barry, the source code is available in the IMified knowledge base. The IMified team notes that it’s also a good example of performing HTTP Authentication in python.

(And rather than include the source code here, I’ll just point you over to the IMified site.)

We’re excited about adding IMified to the Voxeo family of services and we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what people develop on the platform.

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Technorati Tags: im, imified, google, googleappengine, gae, python, voxeo

eComm organizer Lee Dryburgh recently made the video available of Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn’s talk at eComm in March titled “Building Voice Mashups using SIP Servlets” but which really focused on all the cool things you can do with Tropo.com (and Tropo is built on top of SIP Servlets). You can view it here - and the slides are embedded below the video:

RJ’s slides are available here:

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Technorati Tags: tropo, mashups, SIP, SIP Servlets, RJ Auburn, Voxeo

When exploring a new development environment such as VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse, most developers prefer learning from sample code instead of scanning through 1000+ pages of documentation. Hence, VoiceObjects professional services have built an all-purpose demo application, Prime Telecom, that represents a multi-channel (IVR, mobile web, text) customer self-service portal for a mobile carrier. The features that you can explore in this demo app are, however, cross-industry: GUI and VUI best practices (such as different confirmation strategies or adapt-to-caller techniques) as well as reference solutions for implementing multi-channel, multi-language, personalized, and testable applications.

This webinar will be interesting for

• anyone who is new to VoiceObjects and is looking for guidance on evaluation,

• experienced VoiceObjects developers who are interested in recently added product features, and
• anyone who wants to present VoiceObjects to others.

This Jam Session is scheduled for Wednesday, May 27th. We will start at 5:00 PM CEST, 11:00 AM EDT, 8:00 AM PDT

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Technorati Tags: voiceobjects, voxeo, samples, applications, self-service, tutorials

If any of you reading this are around tomorrow and wish to join us at 11:00am US Eastern, 8:00am US Pacific, 5:00pm Central European Time, we will be offering a free webinar about what’s new in the impending release of Prophecy 9 and VoiceObjects9. (And if you would like to try out Prophecy 9, you can download the early access release at www.voxeo.com/prophecy )

Please join us for a technical jam session webinar:

Date:Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Time: 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 5pm CET
Topic: What´s new in Prophecy 9 and VoiceObjects 9?

Speakers: Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Stefan Besling, VP Engineering, VoiceObjects Germany GmbH

Abstract: This session will give you an update on the new features and capabilities of Prophecy 9 and VoiceObjects 9.

Dan York will give you an overview of new features of Prophecy 9 including a new simple dashboard to quickly see how your applications are performing, a new rich graphical management console, new deep log analysis tools and increased SIP capabilities . Learn how key component changes will help you optimize your application creation and deployment.

Stefan Besling will speak about Voice Objects 9 and present new event handling features and deeper integration with Prophecy and Prophecy Hosting, as well as a variety of new infrastructure capabilities.

Please join us for getting an update on the latest releases of Prophecy and VoiceObjects.

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FYI, if you have been using the early access release of Prophecy 9, you need to be aware that the existing downloads have a hard-coded license expiration of the end of the day on this coming Sunday, April 12, 2009.

If you are actively using Prophecy 9, you will need to install the attached license key in order to continue operations after Sunday. Simply place the attached License.dat file (Right-click and save the link) into the “SIPMethod/bin” directory inside of the Prophecy 9 installation directory and then restart the SIPMethod service. This will extend the existing license until July 1, 2009.

Thank you for your continued participation in the Prophecy 9 Early Access program. If you have any questions about the installation, please contact our support team at “support@voxeo.com“.

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