Voxeo Developers Corner

Did you miss our free webinar last week about how you can build a “multi-channel” application that interacts with customers across voice, SMS, IM, mobile web and Twitter?

If you missed it, don’t worry… the archive of both the recorded webinar and the slides are available now on the Monthly Jam Sessions page of our VoiceObjects Developer Portal. In the session, Tobias Göbel and Dave Hoff gave a great overview of how you can easily create a single application that interacts across multiple channels using our IMified service and VoiceObjects products. They also provided links to documentation, code samples and more. Please do check it out and get started building your own multi-channel applications today.

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.

With our announcement of Prophecy 10 today, you can now add SMS and instant messaging (IM) to any existing VoiceXML, CallXML or CCXML application. When you login to our Evolution developer portal (and you can sign up for a free account if you don’t have one) and go into the settings for one of your applications through the Application Manager, you will now see that you can choose to make an application a voice application, a text-messaging application, or both:

Once you have added text messaging capability to your application, you can switch to the Contact Methods tab where you can add an SMS-enabled phone number and/or attach IM IDs to the application:

Now you have one application accessible via multiple channels. We’ll write more in the next bit about how to tweak your apps to work with multiple channels… but for those who want to login right now and get started, go right ahead!

P.S. Note you can also do this with Tropo.com applications as well

In a very cool demonstration of what you can do with the IMified platform, you can now use either IM or Twitter to find out the status of bills in the New York state senate.

Shortly after we announced the acquisition of IMified, independent developer Mark Headd let us know he was excited to give it a try for some of the “open government” projects he works on and documents on his VOX POPULI blog. On June 18th, he put up a great example: Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API where you can simply send a Jabber/GoogleTalk IM message to:

opensenate@bot.im

with a New York Senate bill number in it and get back the status of that bill.

When we added Twitter support to IMified last week, Mark quickly added a Twitter ID to his service so that now you can simply send a Twitter “@” message to “@opensenate” with the same kind of request. You can see some of the interaction so far on the twitter.com/opensenate page.

Mark has nicely made available in his blog post the sample PHP code for his IMified bot. Mark has also been exchanging comments with Nathan Freitas from the New York Senate CIO team. It’s very cool to see that Mark was the very first external user of the NY Senate API. (Congrats, Mark!)

It’s all great work and we’re pleased to see what Mark has done with the platform.

Two other comments:

1. I was not personally aware of this NY Senate openness initiative, but from this article, “5 Open tenets of the new NYSenate.gov“, it sounds like some excellent work. (Note to NH state gov’t: can I get access like this, too, please?)

2. How great is it to have the NY Senate CIO office posting their open source code and API documentation on Github! Great to see.

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Technorati Tags: ny, nysenate, open, open government, government, voxeo, imified

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

As you may have noticed last week, we announced the acquisition of a company called IMified and with that we brought in more opportunities and options for developers. Now you can create instant messaging “bots” (or “agents” or whatever you want to call them) that allow you to create applications that interact with users via IM. (More about what you can do with IMified in the acquisition announcement.)

Developer accounts are free over on www.imified.com. Please do sign up and check it out. We’d love to hear what you think of the service. (And you can safely assume that we’ll be evolving the service and adding more to it over the months ahead.)

One aspect of IMified that is a bit different from either Voxeo’s Evolution XML developer portal or our Tropo.com site is that with IMified you do need to host your application on a web server somewhere. With both Evolution and Tropo, you can host your application on your own server and simply point Evolution or Tropo to the URL of your app, but there is also the option with both services of hosting your apps directly within our hosted infrastructure. With IMified you do need to host your application somewhere and then provide the URL inside IMified when configuring your bot.

The beautiful thing about this, of course, is that it means you can write the bot application in whatever language you want on whatever operating system you want and using whatever tools you want. All your application has to do is use the IMified API to communicate with the IMified platform.

One place developers can host a web services app these days is certainly Google App Engine, and the IMified team just posted a knowledge base article showing an example bot in python hosted on Google App Engine. Courtesy of an IMified user named Barry, the source code is available in the IMified knowledge base. The IMified team notes that it’s also a good example of performing HTTP Authentication in python.

(And rather than include the source code here, I’ll just point you over to the IMified site.)

We’re excited about adding IMified to the Voxeo family of services and we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what people develop on the platform.

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Technorati Tags: im, imified, google, googleappengine, gae, python, voxeo