Voxeo Developers Corner

With the start of 2011, have you tried out our VoiceObjects Application Lifecycle Suite lately? VoiceObjects provides an easy-to-use graphical environment inside the industry-standard Eclipse IDE. It provide real-time analytics about how people are using your application, can integrate with leading Business Intelligence (BI) systems, can work with many different media platforms (not just Voxeo’s), and can create applications that can work in multiple channels including voice, SMS, IM, mobile web, Twitter and USSD. One development environment, one set of logs and analytics, many different communication channels.

If you would like to try out VoiceObjects on your Windows or Mac system, simply go to our VoiceObjects Developer Portal at:

http://developers.voiceobjects.com

And download either (or both) of the two available releases:

• VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse (DfE) Developer Edition 9.1 for Windows and Mac
• EARLY ACCESS: VoiceObjects DfE 10 with VoiceObjects On-Demand

The developer portal also has tutorials, archived versions of webinars and many other tools and tips to help you get started.

With the new year, how about trying a new tool? What are you waiting for?

Yes it really is as easy as one-click… check it out in the video below – and then head on over to our Evolution developer portal to give it a try:

If you want more information about our text messaging capabilities – or to find out about availability of SMS numbers in regions where you want to send or receive text messages, please contact us.

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');

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.