Voxeo Developers Corner

Time to clear my bookmarks out. Here’s some stuff you might enjoy.

• Mark Headd has been playing with CouchDB shows how to install it and use it with Tropo. Mark’s detailed instructions on installing CouchDB should be able to help you quickly get this up and running. Not familiar with CouchDB? It’s a database that is accessed over RESTful HTTP and stores its data as JSON.
• Mark also wrote up how to use user agent sniffing to deploy both text and voice apps on Prophecy showing VoiceXML developers how to easily add SMS and IM to their applications.
• Thanks to Silicon Valet, you can manage your Google Calendar from your phone, powered by Tropo. Hear your appointments read to you and create voice notes for later. The creator, Ted Gilchrist is also working on Talk-o-Gram, a platform for exchanging short voice notes with your Gmail contacts.
• Dominique Boucher looks at the rise of API-oriented voice services (including Tropo) in Back to Basics
• Ian Mercer has created the ultimate home automation platform. Detects when someone’s in a part of the house and appropriately adjusts lighting, heat, and more. A web-based management console shows a log of the house activities and allows you to manage the house from your browser. You have to watch the demo to believe it (it uses Silverlight and takes a while to load, but it’s worth the wait.) But what if he forgets to turn off the oven when he leaves the house? He can call it and turn it off. Every appliance is connected to the phone.
• Aslam Bari created the SalesForce Pinger to allow your application to send instant messages to your SalesForce users when certain events are triggered. Alert everyone that a sale just closed or that there’s a new lead available. Install the Pinger package from SalesForce and then add some simple code to your triggers. BotService.sendMessage('We won this opportunity');

How do you authenticate your callers before giving them access to confidential information? What if your application could recognize the caller’s voice? Voxeo has partnered with four of the leading voice biometrics suppliers to make implementing this technology in your VoiceXML application easier.

We’ve written a how-to guide for each biometrics vendor, showing the steps required to get set up with their platform and put together sample code for integrating biometrics into your VoiceXML app.

The intent of these guides and the trial accounts that our partners are offering is to introudce developers to voice biometrics on Voxeo’s platforms and demonstrate voice verification services with each vendor.

With each vendor, the general process is to apply for a developer or trial account and then use your account information in the sample VoiceXML applications that we’ll give you. You’re welcome to explore the documentation from each vendor to create more complex cases and to try biometrics in your own applications.

There’s two steps that your application will need to perform: enrollment and verification. Enrollment sets up a user in the biometrics platform and stores their voiceprint for future identification. Verification is the step performed when you want to check a caller against a previously-stored voiceprint.

The sample application we provide here is a simple use case. A caller calls in and our application uses their caller ID as the account number. We’ll start enrollment, and if the caller is successfully enrolled, we’ll start verification against this new voiceprint, asking for their password.  Obviously your real biometrics application can be much more complex. For instance, normally you would store the enrollment status of the caller and only start enrollment if they hadn’t previously enrolled. But this simple demo application should give you an idea of the basic steps required to add a similar biometrics feature from each vendor.

Each of the included examples uses a similar process for connecting your application to the biometrics service. The call is processed by your VoiceXML application and you either send data to a remote server using the <data> element or you transfer control of the call to a subdialog hosted on the remote server.

For the some vendors, your caller’s voice is recorded on your server and then the voice file is transmitted to the biometrics server. It makes decisions and passes the results back to you, allowing you to notify your caller. All interaction passes through your application.

Other vendors use subdialogs to record and process the voiceprints with your caller’s voice transmitted directly to the biometrics server. You choose when to hand off control of the call and the biometrics server gives it back to you when it’s done.

The end result is the same, however, and your caller won’t notice the difference.

To try biometrics in your application, visit the Voxeo Biometrics page for details on each vendor and a brief guide on how to get started.