Voxeo Developers Corner

Voxeo is beginning the end-of-life process for Prophecy 9, which will be replaced by Prophecy 11 On-Demand and On-Premise products. While applications running on Prophecy 8, 9 or 10 will also run on Prophecy 11, we encourage you to begin evaluating and testing your P9 applications to ensure no updates are needed so that they run smoothly on the Prophecy 11 platform. Prophecy 11 offers significant platform improvements and new infrastructure to support faster deployments and upgrade efficiency.

With regards to timeline, Voxeo will continue critical software updates and technical support for Prophecy 9 until November 1, 2012. We will discontinue Software Maintenance and Support as of December 31, 2012.

For more information about Migration, see http://help.voxeo.com/helpserver/go/evolution/Migration. Our support team is available 24/7 to assist with porting efforts.

All customers have been notified that as of March 31, 2012, Voxeo has stopped supporting Prophecy 8 as a hosted offering – no further fixes or features will be created. Any remaining hosted apps using Prophecy 8 will be force-migrated to Prophecy 11 in the near future. If a customer needs to remain on Prophecy 8 for a longer duration on an exception-only basis, there will be additional fees that apply.

For more information about Migration, please see http://help.voxeo.com/helpserver/go/evolution/Migration. As always, if any issues are encountered when testing your P8 apps on P11, Voxeo Support is standing-by 24×7, and is ready to help you resolve the issues.

On March 8th, 2012, Voxeo is implementing some configuration changes to the hosted Prophecy 11 staging environment related to ASR, which will affect those who currently use Prophecy ASR for voice recognition.

First, we’re making Voxeo Premium ASR, our premium speech engine with increased ASR accuracy, the default speech recognition engine. The previous default – Prophecy ASR – will cease to be available in Staging for new applications and will be fully phased out of Voxeo hosting by the beginning of the third quarter of 2012. None of your existing Staging applications should require any changes, but we recommend testing them on the new ASR engine in the Staging environment.

Second, we’re renaming our Prophecy 11 Staging platforms to more accurately reflect whether they contain Premium ASR and TTS. Any platform not annotated as containing Premium TTS will contain Voxeo’s standard US English TTS. The name changes are as follows:

US Staging

• Prophecy 11 CallXML becomes Prophecy 11 CallXML Premium ASR

• Prophecy 11 CCXML becomes Prophecy 11 CCXML Premium ASR
• Prophecy 11 VoiceXML becomes Prophecy 11 VoiceXML Premium ASR
• Prophecy 11, Multi-Language CallXML becomes Prophecy 11 CallXML Premium ASR/TTS
• Prophecy 11, Multi-Language CCXML becomes Prophecy 11 CCXML Premium ASR/TTS
• Prophecy 11, Multi-Language VoiceXML becomes Prophecy 11 VoiceXML Premium ASR/TTS
• Prophecy 11 – VOD w/ SMS becomes Prophecy 11 VoiceObjects On-Demand w/SMS Premium ASR

EU Staging

• EU – Prophecy 11, Multi-Language CallXML becomes EU – Prophecy 11 CallXML Premium ASR/TTS

• EU – Prophecy 11, Multi-Language CCXML becomes EU – Prophecy 11 CCXML Premium ASR/TTS
• EU – Prophecy 11, Multi-Language VoiceXML becomes EU – Prophecy 11 VoiceXML Premium ASR/TTS
• EU – Prophecy 11 – VoiceObjects On-Demand becomes EU – Prophecy 11 VoiceObjects On-Demand Premium ASR/TTS

This will subsequently be rolled out across hosted production environments for Prophecy 11 over the next two to four weeks, and we’ll keep all customers updated ahead of the changes with global Support Tickets. If you’re currently using Prophecy ASR, thoroughly test your existing Prophecy 11 Production applications using the Premium ASR engine in the Staging environment before running your application in the Production environment. You should expect higher recognition accuracy, especially for shorter utterances.

Additionally, as a reminder, the end-of-life date for Prophecy 8 is March 31, 2012. After this date, Prophecy 8 will no longer be supported as a hosted offering, and no further fixes or features will be created. Remaining hosted apps will be migrated to Prophecy 11 in the near future. Those who need to remain on Prophecy 8 on an exception basis should contact us to learn more about additional fees that will apply. For more information about Migration, see http://help.voxeo.com/helpserver/go/evolution/Migration. Our support team is available 24/7 to assist with porting efforts.

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.

One of the interesting aspects of the Q&A session of our last Developer Jam Session where we discussed Prophecy 11 was the amount of interest in integrating fax as a communication channel.

And while I personally don’t do much with fax, it’s obvious that some of our customers would like to use it and are very interested in how to do more with it. We’ve included a page in our Prophecy 11 documentation that describes how to both receive and send faxes using P11 and an appropriate T.38 gateway device.

That page includes a couple of sample files in CCXML and to make it even a bit easier to get the files and use them, I’ve copied them up to a public repository on Github:

https://github.com/voxeo/prophecy-fax

Over time we may add more samples to the repo as we make other tutorials. Please feel free to use the samples, copy/paste the code, etc. If you set up Prophecy 11 for fax usage and have an example you’d like to pass along to others, please feel free to contact us (or, if you are a Github user, feel free to fork the repo, commit your changes and issue a pull request).

Enjoy!

Would you like to learn more about our recent releases of Prophecy 11 and VoiceObjects 11? In our August 2011 Developer Jam Session I outlined what is new in the new releases of both our core products. You can download the PDF of the slides or the recording of the session from the Jam Session page. You can also watch the session on YouTube:

And if you’d like to try it out yourself, just visit our download page to download a free copy of Prophecy 11 or VoiceObjects 11 for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

We are very pleased to announce today the release of Voxeo Prophecy 11, adding support for “HD audio” (a.k.a. “wideband audio”), IPv6 networks and fax communications. You can download Prophecy 11 immediately for use on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X at:

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

The press release about Prophecy 11 has the basic information about the release – and watch this Voxeo Developers Corner blog for more posts over the next few days highlighting how you can use all the new features in “P11″.

You can also read the Prophecy 11 Release Notes and watch our recent Developer Jam Session webcasts about HD Audio and IPv6:

• How Do You Hear Me Now? The Power of Wideband (HD) Audio
• IPv6 and How It Impacts Communication Applications

More technical blog posts will be published soon… meanwhile, just visit our Prophecy download page to get started today!

I enjoy all the curious data points that you can find in Google Analytics. For instance, when watching the downloads of our free Prophecy platform, it seemed curious to me that Thursday was repeatedly the day of the most downloads. Here’s a chart comparing the most recent two weeks:

The chart starts on Monday and in both weeks Thursday is the day of the highest number of downloads. Going back to look at other weeks, it seems to be a common occurrence… not in all weeks, but in many of them.

Why?

I haven’t yet dug into more source details to try to see what causes this recurrence, but I will at some point.

Meanwhile, I’ll ask you all… when is the last time you downloaded Prophecy? Was it a Thursday?

With the start of a new year, how about starting it out with a new download? Want to build a outbound notification system? Or a conferencing system? Or a traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system? Want to hook up an IVR to a SIP-based system entirely using SIP? Or just want to play with VoiceXML, CCXML or CallXML as new languages to learn?

Whatever the case… you can download a free copy of Prophecy 10 for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, simply by going to:

www.voxeo.com/prophecy

Download it on multiple platforms… try it out.. build sample apps… build production apps… build whatever you want. The cool part is that Prophecy is the same app platform running in our Prophecy Hosting environment. So you can build your app on your premise using Prophecy installed locally… and then deploy that app up into our hosted cloud… or keep it on your premise… or do both. (It doesn’t matter to us! Whatever works best for you.)

Give it a try! And if you run into any issues getting Prophecy set up… our support team is always standing by at support@voxeo.com, 24X7, 365 days a year… just waiting to help! (And via LiveChat and phone, too…)

When we released the GA version of Prophecy 10, one of the most fundamental changes was one we also didn’t talk a whole lot about in the announcements.  As part of the time we spent looking at how to make Prophecy even more simple and intuitive to developers, we spent a great amount of time working on a new user interface for the “Commander” management console.  We’re quite pleased with the result:

Easy icons along the top letting you switch between major area.  Simple entry points from the dashboard to let you jump into frequently-used areas. Nice and clean.

Have you checked it out?  If so, what do you think?

If you haven’t tried Prophecy 10 yet, it is available for free download for Microsoft Windows, Linux or Mac OS X at:

www.voxeo.com/prophecy

We’d love to hear your feedback!