Voxeo Developers Corner

This post is part of a series exploring voice applications and VoiceXML through the eyes of a web developer. For the rest of the series, see the index.

I’ll admit it. Before joining Voxeo, I wasn’t much of a voice guy. I’m a web guy. I was pretty sure that voice applications were created through witchcraft. Turns out, there’s no magic involved, just some standards and markup languages. If you can create a web app, you can create a voice app. Voxeo has some great developer documentation and detailed tutorials available through Evolution, our developer portal. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be walking through some examples as I learn, from the perspective of a web developer, VoiceXML, CCXML, and Voxeo’s own CallXML.

I’ll start with VoiceXML. VoiceXML is a W3C standard, just like HTML is. Like HTML, your code is executed in a browser, but instead of a visual browser on a computer screen, in this case it’s a voice browser that you use over the telephone. To test out any of the samples I’m going to create, I’m going to need a VoiceXML browser attached to the telephone network. Voxeo provides developers with free accounts and a phone number so you can build and test your app. You’ll also need a web server to host your XML file, but Voxeo will provide some hosting space for you for free if you’d like.

Go over to Evolution and create an account. Then go to the Application Manager.

Create a new application and call it anything you’d like. Then decide how you want your app to work. For now, I’m only using voice, so I don’t need text messaging. I can always add it in the future if I change my mind.

I need to tell Evolution where my VoiceXML file is at by providing a URL for it. Since I’m going to create a Hello World application and host it on my own server, I’m putting in the URL I intend to use for my VoiceXML file. Again, I can change this later if I decide on a different file name or path.

After I create my app, I have a new tab at the top of the page that gives me some phone numbers I can use to call my application.

Clicking on that tab reveals a local number, a toll-free number, and numbers to call from Skype, SIP, and iNum providers. I can also add a dedicated local number if I’d like. Since I’m going to test with Skype, I don’t need a local number, but if you’re testing from your phone, grab one.

And that’s it. I now have a VoiceXML browser hooked up to the telephone network that I can use to test my application. In my next post a couple of days from now, I’ll create my first app.

Related posts:

1. VoiceXML for web developers: Hello World
2. Processing Input (VoiceXML for Web Developers)
3. Collecting touch tone input (VoiceXML for Web Developers)
4. VoiceXML for Web Developers: Collecting Input
5. VoiceXML Variable Scoping

Tags: Tutorials, VoiceXML, web

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