Voxeo Developers Corner

As I’ve long been a fan of ReadWriteWeb, I was pleased to see that this past week they launched “ReadWriteHack“, a new “channel” focused on developers. It’s available at:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/

As their intro says:

Our Channel ReadWriteHack, sponsored by the Intel Atom Developer Program, is a resource and guide for developers. ReadWriteHack will outline best practices for designing and developing applications. We will also provide examples of hacks and how they work, to inspire you and show you what’s possible.

It’s great to see RWW adding a focus on developers, and it’s certainly joined my list of sites to regularly follow. Looking forward to seeing what they write about!

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 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.

Have you wanted to develop and test applications that were globally accessible by your customers? Have you wanted your potential customers to be able to call into a number in Europe rather than having to call a US number or use Skype or SIP? Have you been excited about the idea of multi-channel applications that used voice and SMS… but wanted a SMS number from outside the US?

Now you can… with the free international developer program we just announced today. While our production customers have always been able to get phone numbers (DIDs) around the world and to make outbound calls to any country, developers using free accounts on our Evolution developer portal have been limited to free US numbers and to outbound calls in the US only. We have had a developer program for people outside the US for some time, but there were fees involved and it was too limited for what we really wanted to offer.

That has all changed – if you login to your Evolution account today (or create a new free account), you will find that you now have these new capabilities:

• SMS-enabled International Numbers - Moving beyond simply using voice, developers can add SMS-enabled numbers and enable their application to communicate with customers via both voice and text/SMS.  

• Support for New Languages  - Applications using Speech Recognition (ASR) or Speech Synthesis (TTS) can now choose from over 20 languages and voices, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Swedish, UK English and many more. See the full list online.

• Self-provisioning of International DID Numbers - Developers can easily add international inbound DID numbers from over 40 countries to their applications through a simple web interface. With a click in a web form, your application can be accessible from numbers around the world! (And naturally you can add multiple numbers to your app!)
  

• International Outbound Dialing - In the development environment, applications can make outbound calls for free to 18 countries, including: Belgium, Canada, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA. Note that the free calls are to landlines only, except for the USA where you can also call mobile numbers for free.

• Country-specific Developer Dial-In Numbers – Developers can now dial local numbers in countries across EMEA to test their applications. Previously developers could test using U.S. numbers, as well as using Skype or SIP. Now we’ve made it so that you and the people testing your app can dial numbers in local countries, enter your app ID as the PIN, and be talking to your app.
  

More information about this new program can be found in the developer program FAQ.

We’re excited to expand our free developer program globally and we’re looking forward to adding even more capabilities in the weeks and months ahead! Our goal is to make it easy for you all to build communication applications… and we’re looking forward to seeing what you all do with these new features.

Would you like to build “multi-channel” communications apps where customers can interact with your app via voice, IM, SMS, web and Twitter? Would you like to take existing voice applications you have developed and add these new channels to that app? Does the idea of writing an application once and having it interact with all these different communication channels intrigue you? Are you seeing requests from customers to interact with you in ways other than voice?

If so, please join our free Developer Jam Session webinar on this coming Wednesday, October 7th, 2009:

Topic: IMify your voice application! Exploring new ways of customer interaction with Voxeo VoiceObjects and IMified

Date: Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Time: 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 5pm CEST

Speakers:
Dave Hoff, Senior Engineer, Voxeo
Tobias Goebel, Sr. Presales Consultant, Voxeo Germany

Abstract: With the acquisition of IMified and VoiceObjects, Voxeo has demonstrated its clear commitment to be the number 1 provider of Unified Self-Service™: the idea that one and the same service definition can drive dialogs in any modality available to end customers, be it voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM, Web, or even social networks.

This jam session introduces IMified, Voxeo’s hosted platform for Instant Messaging bots, and explains how VoiceObjects can be utilized to build dialogs that extend the scope of customer interaction to Instant Messaging networks such as Yahoo, Skype, AOL, MSN, or Google Talk, but also other text-based channels such as SMS or Twitter. Learn how to IMify your existing VoiceObjects application with minimal developer effort but maximum customer impact.

If you can’t attend on Wednesday, the session will be archived on our Monthly Jam Sessions web page for later viewing.

As I just wrote at the top of the previous post about Snow Leopard, both Prophecy 9 and Prophecy 10 now support Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard. The Prophecy 9 GA build announced this morning, 9.0.37680.0, provides this support as does Prophecy 10 build 10.0.37671.0. Both are available from:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/

Enjoy!

Are you interested in developing advanced speech applications? Would you like to learn about new tools to help in the rapid development of grammars for speech apps? If so, join in to our free Developer Jam Session webinar on this coming Wednesday, September 16, 2009:

Topic: Advanced Speech Grammar Management with the Professional Edition of NuGram IDE

Date: September 16th, 2009
Time: 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 5pm CEST

Speakers:
Tobias Goebel, Sr. Presales Consultant, Voxeo Germany
Dominique Boucher, Product Manager – NuGram, Nu Echo

Abstract: Following up on the introduction of NuGram IDE for grammar engineering and management back in September 2008, this session will provide an update on the latest developments around this grammar tool offering.

We will introduce the new professional edition, explain how it extends the free basic edition, give a demo of the tool and show how it integrates with VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse. The basic edition will be bundled with VoiceObjects (see also here) to have an integrated solution for grammar engineering within the VoiceObjects service creation environment.

The jam session will be closed with a NuGram product roadmap and an outlook for 2009 and 2010.

If you can’t attend on Wednesday, the session will be archived on our Monthly Jam Sessions web page for later viewing.

UPDATE – Sept 14, 2009: Both Prophecy 9 and Prophecy 10 now support Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard. The Prophecy 9 GA build announced this morning, 9.0.37680.0, provides this support as does Prophecy 10 build 10.0.37671.0. Both are available from:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/

While we were thrilled to see Apple release Snow Leopard about a month early, we were not so thrilled to find that Apple had changed some of the core components and that as a result Prophecy 9 and 10 will not run correctly.

To explain a bit further, we encountered two major problems. First, Snow Leopard now ships with Java 1.6… but ONLY with Java 1.6. No Java 1.5, which was what we have been using and testing.  

Second, our service manager uses the sendSynchronousRequest API and the way in which the API was called changed. The result was that the pull-down menu from the icon in the Mac OS X menu bar did not show any services.

There was also a minor issue with the HTTP interface and a really silly issue where it turned out our installer was looking for a version number with three parts, like “10.6.0″, while Apple made the version number for Snow Leopard simply “10.6″.

We’ve got fixes underway and hope to have an updated release available by the end of next week. We’ll update this post when we have more information.

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