Voxeo Developers Corner

Pavel Růžička recently shared this SlideShare presentation, “How To Make a List In a Voice App Shorter By Entering Letters Via DTMF,” which specifically applies to using Voxeo’s VoiceObjects to manage lists with DTMF input. Pavel demonstrates how to treat the VoiceObjects list object as “an audible Excel sheet with unified navigation,” and walks through the programming steps necessary to manage these lists. Ideas discussed in the presentation include collecting input, handling alphanumeric input as well as special characters, translating input, and filtering and iterating lists, including ways to use DTMF to provide navigation within longer lists.

View the presentation, and check out some of Pavel’s other related tutorials:

The latest version of the Prophecy Media Platform, version 11.5, is now available for download at www.voxeo.com/prophecy. This release brings greater reliability, but most importantly, for those of you looking for higher densities, you’re getting a big performance boost.  Prophecy 11.5 is rated at 750 ports and 25 call setups per second with full VoiceXML load on a typical basic Intel server.  What does that mean to you?   750 ports is obviously the max number of concurrent calls.  Imagine that you have all those ports busy, eight hours a day, 20 days a month.  That adds up to 7,200,000 minutes.  Of course, we wouldn’t recommend a single box system of that magnitude because you would be putting all your eggs in one basket, but for high-end systems, Prophecy 11.5 port density is leading the market.

Call setups per second matter, too.  If a box is rated with high port counts but the call setups per second is not correspondingly high, you may not be able to handle the rate of traffic and your ports will be idle.  For example, take 25 call setups per second times 30 seconds per call.  To go from zero to peak traffic, you start up 25 new calls every second for thirty seconds.  That gives you 25 times 30, equaling 750 calls started up in 30 seconds.  If your call lengths were only six seconds, because maybe you’re doing a voting application or something like that, you would peak at 25 * 6 = 150 calls.  Most Voxeo applications have a call duration of about 60 seconds, so Prophecy 11.5 has a call setup per second rate that is well matched to making sure you can get the optimum use out of your Prophecy ports.