Voxeo Developers Corner

Have you ever wanted to compare automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines?  That was the topic of a three-hour tutorial given by Voxeo’s Dan Burnett at SpeechTEK last week in New York. Dan gave a hands-on session as part of “SpeechTEK University” where students received an in-depth lesson in how to compare and evaluate ASR engines.  The session description was:

Dan’s slides are available for viewing and download:

Obviously you need some of the sample files to work through the lab exercises, but the rest of slides do cover what Dan discussed.

At SpeechTEK last week in New York, Voxeo’s Dan Burnett was part of a panel session on the topic of “speech mashups.” The session description was:

10:15 AM – 11:00 AM - C101 – Mashups: Integrate Multiple Web Services into Your App - Dan Burnett, Director of Speech Technologies

Learn how speech technologies from recognition to transcription and beyond, now available in the cloud, are being accessed to create multimodal applications. Learn how new licensing models are emerging; novel partnerships are being formed; and the role of vendors, operators, and developers is being redefined. See demonstrations of some new service opportunities made possible with speech mashups. Discover how easy it is to create your own mashups that use speech and how they compare to what you can do with VoiceXML.

Dan talked about mashups and then demonstrated a mashup using Tropo and the Ruby programming language. His slides are available for viewing or download:

As we announced today over on our Voxeo Talks blog, the GA version of Prophecy 10 is now available for free download onto Windows, Linux or Mac OS X at:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy10

Both the Voxeo Talks article and the Prophecy 10 Release Notes describe in more detail all the great features and improvements in this release. The most significant improvement for you all may be the huge performance increase with P10. While previous Prophecy versions maxed out around 400-500 simultaneous calls, we’ve demonstrated P10 running upwards of 6,000 simultaneous calls per server.

This Prophecy 10 release was really all about focusing on performance, reliability and usability improvements… we’d love you to try it out and tell us what you think about it!

As part of our 100% Uptime Guarantee for Text Messaging we announced earlier this week, I posted a short video showing the process:

If you haven’t tried it out yourself, turning an existing voice application into a text messaging application is literally just one radio button on a form… try it!

P.S. If you want to try it out yourself but don’t yet have an Evolution account, just head over to evolution.voxeo.com. Accounts are free for development use… as are the phone numbers and the inbound/outbound text messaging.

If you want to build voice, SMS or IM applications using the VoiceObjects On-Demand service we announced today, here are the five easy steps you need to do to begin:

1. CREATE AN EVOLUTION ACCOUNT (if you don’t already have one) – Just head over to evolution.voxeo.com and sign up for a free account. If you already have an account, you’re all set.

2. DOWNLOAD/INSTALL VOICEOBJECTS 10 DESKTOP FOR ECLIPSE – Head over to:

http://developers.voiceobjects.com/trials/downloads.php?product=vod

And download “Desktop for Eclipse” (DfE) for either Windows or Mac OS X. The download has everything you need. You do not need to separately download/install Eclipse.

The installation does come with a full “Documentation” directory if you would like to read more about VoiceObjects.

Note: If you already have Eclipse installed on your system, we will be releasing the plugin separately later… for right now, though, you need to download the full bundled DfE and run VoiceObjects On-Demand out of this installation.

3. LAUNCH VOICEOBJECTS 10 DfE – Double-click the “Eclipse” icon and start up Desktop for Eclipse.

4. CHANGE FROM STANDALONE MODE TO VOICEOBJECTS ON-DEMAND – Go up to the “Eclipse” menu and choose “Preferences”. You will see a screen like this:

Click on “VoiceObjects” on the left side and select the radio button next to “Work with VoiceObjects On-Demand”. Enter the login credentials for your Evolution account (that you may have created in step #1), press “Test connection” and, assuming that works, press “OK”.

5. START WORKING WITH THE SAMPLE APP – You now will see a “Guess my number” app visible on the left side of your Eclipse window. That’s a VoiceObjects sample app. Click the arrow next to the name to see “Version 1.0″:

Double-click “Version 1.0″ to see the app in the Object view. Open up the Components and then Module areas:

Control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) the Guess My Number module and choose to “Deploy Application” to the “VOD Sample App” service:

Start calling!

NOTE: We have identified a bug where the “Click to call using Skype” function does not work on the Mac version of VoiceObjects 10 DfE. We’re still working on it… in the meantime, you can use Phono to call the app or configure additional numbers in Evolution.

That’s it… now, there is a lot more you can do with it. For starters, you can log back into Evolution and add a phone number for voice or SMS and add IM names. (Stay tuned for a blog post on that!) You can also check out the documentation that comes with your installation…. and watch for more blog posts here.