Voxeo Developers Corner

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!

As we announced today over on our Voxeo Talks blog, the GA version of Prophecy 10 is now available for free download onto Windows, Linux or Mac OS X at:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy10

Both the Voxeo Talks article and the Prophecy 10 Release Notes describe in more detail all the great features and improvements in this release. The most significant improvement for you all may be the huge performance increase with P10. While previous Prophecy versions maxed out around 400-500 simultaneous calls, we’ve demonstrated P10 running upwards of 6,000 simultaneous calls per server.

This Prophecy 10 release was really all about focusing on performance, reliability and usability improvements… we’d love you to try it out and tell us what you think about it!

If you would like a little taste of what is new in the upcoming Prophecy 10 (for which RC2 was just made available for download yesterday), Voxeo VP of Engineering Dan Polfer gave a brief talk at the Voxeo Customer Summit last week where he outlined the new features and changes in the release. His slides are now available on SlideShare:

You can try out Prophecy 10 yourself by downloading a free version.

Following on our recent release of Prophecy 10 RC1, we are pleased to announce Prophecy 10 RC2 available for download today at: www.voxeo.com/prophecy. We’re getting very close to a final release with this RC2 and feedback is very definitely appreciated. New functionality in Prophecy 10.0.43379.0 RC2 includes:

• Added user roles Operator, Support – user accounts designated as “Operator” can administer the server but cannot modify user accounts; user accounts designated as “Support” have read-only access to the Prophecy administrative console.
• Added the ability to control the sound level and speed on media through the SSML “media” tag
• Improved support for recording in MP3 format
• Expanded the list of available voices for multiple speech server modules
• Added a tutorial link to the initial splash dialog
• Added support for apostrophes in utterances
• Miscellaneous usability improvements

Note: This Prophecy 10 RC2 release is still part of our Early Access release program and should be used at your own risk. Prophecy 9 is also available for those wanting a stable production release.

The new version of Prophecy 10 can be downloaded for free for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux at http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/ More information about Prophecy 10 in general can be found in the release notes.

Questions or feedback about Prophecy 10 can be raised either as private support tickets in your Evolution account or in the public Prophecy 10 Beta forums.

For those of you who want to live on the bleeding edge of Voxeo software – or want to see what’s coming in the next release of Prophecy – the first “release candidate”, RC1, of Prophecy 10 is now available for download at www.voxeo.com/prophecy.  Prophecy 10.0.42798 RC1 is a major milestone as P10 moves closer to release. New functionality in this release includes:

• 64-bit Linux support.
• Support for the Speex codec.
• Support for G.729b (silence suppression).
• CCXML applications can now send and receive SIP INFO messages.
• Ability to access SIP headers directly in VoiceXML. Previously you could only access SIP headers from CCXML. Now, in VoiceXML SIP headers are available in ‘session.connection.protocol.sip.<header-name>’ (Note that ‘.’ and ‘-’ in the header name are converted to ‘_’).
• Ability to independently backup and restore the Prophecy 10 provisioning database.
• Over 600 fixes and performance improvements.

Note: This Prophecy 10 RC1 release is still part of our Early Access release program and should be used at your own risk. Prophecy 9 is also available for those wanting a stable production release.

The new version of Prophecy 10 can be downloaded for free for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux at http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/ More information about Prophecy 10 in general can be found in the release notes.