Voxeo Talks

Over the next couple of months you’ll get a chance to hear from us and meet us at a couple of upcoming conferences.

First, from July 21-25 I’ll be up in Portland, Oregon, at O’Reilly’s OSCON 2008 giving a talk on “Mashing up Voice and the Web through Open Source and XML“. As the intro says:

With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the web let us quickly and easily access information from multiple data sources, how do we extend those mashups to the world of the phone? How do we bring the old world of voice and telephony into the new world of the web, social networks and social media? And how do we do that using open source tools and open standards?

The session description gets into a bit more about specifically what I’ll be addressing. It should be a good time! As you can see from the schedule, OSCON is a strongly developer-focused show and so it should be a great time connecting with developers out there and talking about our platform. Speaking at this show is a bit of neat experience for me personally, too, as I spoke at one of the first OSCON’s back in 2000 when it was still called the “Open Source Conference” and was held in Monterey, CA. I know a good number of folks in the O’Reilly orbit so I’m looking forward to connecting with lots of people out there.

Next up, both RJ and I will be speaking at SpeechTEK, August 18-20 in New York City. In fact, we’ll have a team of Voxeons there as we’ll have an exhibit booth and all sorts of things going on at the show. (More on that in later posts.)

RJ will be speaking first on Monday, August 18th, along with VoiceXML Forum founder Ken Rehor on the subject of “The Impact of W3C standard languages“:

The publication of W3C standard languages, such as VoiceXML and CCXML, has dramatically changed the speech application design process. This session discusses some of the efforts to extend and validate the use of standard languages. Learn how the call control language can work with SIP and VoIP to implement an extensible SIP softswitch. Discover how the VoiceXML Forum’s certification program has impacted the cross-vendor interoperability of VoiceXML by VoiceXML platform vendors.

Given our huge focus on open standards and RJ’s direct involvement as chair of the W3C’s CCXML Working Group, you can expect this session to deliver a wealth of information! (Hmmm… how high can I set the expectation bar for RJ? Hmmm… “he’s going to show how open standards solve world hunger!”… no, that’s a bit too high! RJ is, though, an excellent presenter as you may get a glimpse of from his past slide decks.)

I’ll follow with a session on Tuesday, August 19th, called “Securing CCXML and VoiceXML Applications“:

How secure are your speech applications? As the usage of both VoiceXML and CCXML continues to explode, and VoIP usage continues to grow dramatically, especially within enterprise environments, it is increasingly important that you ensure that applications and services are not open to attack. Learn about the potential vulnerabilities in a system using VoiceXML or CCXML, what you can do to secure these systems, and how you can develop a strong architecture.

Given my VoIP security background, it’s somewhat predictable that I’d be talking on this subject, eh? Seriously, though, it’s an area that doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of thought and so I’ll be taking a look at what the real risks are and how you can look at addressing them.

If you are going to either OSCON or SpeechTEK, please do leave a comment here or drop us an email and let us know. We love to meet face-to-face with blog readers and/or customers/developers. As much as we are able to do so (not sure yet), we’ll make the presentations available through this site. Stay tuned for more info - and we look forward to potentially seeing some of you in either Portland or New York!

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, conferences, rj auburn, dan york, oscon, oreilly, oscon2008, speechtek, speechtek2008, voicexml, security, voip security, ccxml, mashups, xml

Have you checked out the Party Line application for Facebook that I wrote about a few weeks back?

Well, the folks at Equals have spent some time working on the application and listening to the feedback from users. They’ve made some changes to it and also clarified some of the usage terms. Here are the major changes:

• Removed the initial advertisement that people being called out had to listen to when they were put into a call. Callers now just get dropped immediately into the conference bridge so that you can start talking! Note that the person initiating the call still hears a brief ad while the service is connecting the other members of the call.

• Clarified in their FAQ that calls are at least for the initial rollout limited to a maximum of 15 minutes.

The team there at Equals is continuing to look at ways to improve the application and are definitely looking for feedback as well. If you haven’t checked it out, we encourage you to read our previous post and then simply get started using the Party Line application inside of Facebook.

We’d also note that Equals CEO Ajay Madhok recently gave an interview to The Social Times which has now been released as a podcast if you would like to know more about the company and what they are doing.

We’re pleased to see an application using our platform to bring voice inside of Facebook - and we look forward to seeing what they come up with next!

Technorati Tags:
applications, facebook, facebook applications, facebook platform, voxeo, equals, social networking, voip, voice, voice applications, voice mashups, sip, prophecy, ccxml, xml, voicexml, ivr, opensocial, party line, conferencing, collaboration

Would you like to learn what’s involved with “creating Communication 2.0 applications?” Now courtesy of the great folks at IT Conversations you can listen to Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn give his eComm 2008 presentation on just this topic. Over in our Voxeo Developers Corner blog, we previously linked to RJ’s slide set and provided the source code for his CCXML -> Twitter example, but now you can listen to the talk as well. Here’s the description of his talk, which runs about 15 minutes:

Developing applications for telephony and communication is very difficult. There are old, proprietary systems to integrate with, standards are rare, and when there are standards, they are implemented differently and can’t be integrated out of the box. Telephone networks are also closed and restricted by NDAs. Compared to web development, telephony development is a hassle.

RJ Auburn of Voxeo describes how his company’s telephony development stack is the infrastructure that will unlock the creativity of application developers. Using voice XML and CC-XML, developers can interact with telephone services similar to using a web service. This spares them from having to know the gory details of the telephone network. He compares it to the difference between writing standard web pages and having to write an Apache plug-in for each site.

He concludes by showing a sample application that will make a phone call each time a tweet is received from Twitter. This only takes a couple minutes when using the developer tools from Voxeo.

We hope you enjoy RJ’s presentation and if you want to try your hand at creating “Communications 2.0 Applications”, be sure to check out either our free hosted platform or on-premise platform - both available at www.voxeo.com/free We look forward to seeing what great applications you create!

Technorati Tags:
applications, voxeo, rjauburn, ecomm, ecomm2008, conferences, presentations, ccxml, twitter, mashups, voice, telephony

Want to leave a comment on our blog but don’t want to take the time to type it in? If you look at the bottom of this or any Voxeo blog post, you will now see below the comment area this image:

Just click on that image and start talking into your webcam!

As explained in more detail in our “Behind The Blog” post, we’ve installed a new WordPress plugin from a startup named Seesmic that lets us easily create videos to embed in our blog posts and also allows us to accept video comments.

You do NOT need to have a Seesmic account to leave us a video comment!

Just click on the link and start recording. Don’t worry, you have the option to re-record your video and also to cancel the video comment (by clicking the “back to text comment” link) if you don’t like how it came out. If you do have a Seesmic account, the video comment you leave here will be posted to your Seesmic account for others to see, but again, you do NOT need an account to leave a comment here.

So what are you waiting for? If you have a webcam handy, click the link below and tell us what you think of this service!

P.S. If you’d like a spiffy new MacBook Pro with an embedded webcam, consider applying for one of our job openings - the MBP is our corporate standard!

Technorati Tags:
video, seesmic, wordpress, wpmu, wordpress mu, voxeo, wordpress plugins, plugins

Want to get an email message every time we publish a new blog entry? We are now offering the option to subscribe via email. All you need to do is:

1. Click on the “Subscribe via Email” link in the first side bar.

2. Enter your email address in the next form and the anti-spam string of letters.
3. Once you receive a confirmation email, simply click on the link in the email message.

That’s it. Now you will receive a message once a day whenever we have published new blog entries.

NOTE: For the moment, we are only able to make this email subscription feature available for our “All Voxeo Blogs” feed. We are not currently able to make it easily available for the individual blogs. (For more details about why, see this post.)

We will continue to look at ways to make our information more readily accessible. If you have ideas, please feel free to send them along to us or leave them as a comment here. In the meantime, please do feel free to sign up and get an email notification when we post new items. Thanks.

Have you ever wanted to quickly launch a call to a group of friends or colleagues? Say you want to get together for dinner (or a party) and rather than keep going around on IM or email you just want to talk to them all quickly? Or perhaps you are working with a project team scattered all over and as the deadline approaches you want to rapidly get all the team members together on a conference call?

As we are announcing today, a new Facebook application called “Party Line” does exactly that. Built by the folks at Equals, this application lets you create an unlimited number of “party lines”, each of which can have up to five members in it. You can either initiate the call from directly inside of Facebook or you can call 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME (1 877 428 9963) and simply select the number of the party line that you want to launch. The application then calls out to all members of the Party Line and… ta da… you are there in the conference call. Talk as long as you want… it’s free. No conference bridge numbers. No passcodes. Simple. Easy.

Want to try it out? All you need to do is (assuming you already have a Facebook account) go to:

www.equals.com/partyline

That address will automagically redirect you to the Facebook application page where you can simply add the application to your Facebook profile.

Once you have done that, you should be brought to the application page where you have one more step to do before you can get started. Click on the Advanced tab and you will see a place to get enter the phone number you want to use to make/receive calls (typically your mobile phone). Enter your number and press Verify. In a rather cool form of verification, the application will then call you and give you a code to enter into the verification box that pops up.

Now you can go back to the Party Line tab and just start creating party lines and adding in your Facebook friends. If they don’t have the application installed yet, they’ll be prompted to do so when you invite them.

Initiating a “Party Line” call can be easily done in either of two ways:

1. Call 1 877 4 BUZZ ME (1 877 428 9963). For one of the party lines you have created, you simply enter the number after a prompt and the call connects. For a party line created by someone else of which you are a member, you press “#” first and then the number of the party line. In both cases you can listen to the list of available party lines so you don’t have to remember the numbers.

2. Use the Facebook application interface. If you are logged into Facebook, you can just hit the big “equals” button to “Buzz Now! and start the call, as show here:
   

That’s it. After a brief sponsor message you are placed into the conference call with the other members of the party line and can talk for as long - or as little - as you want to.

Would you like to see it in action? Here’s a quick video tour:

We are rather thrilled to see this use of our platform by the folks at Equals. As far as we know, this is the first time a customer has built a Facebook app that uses our application platform, so we’re delighted to see it become available.

More than that, it’s a wonderful example of how someone can build a Facebook app based on the open standards of CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. In particular, Call Control XML (CCXML) is being used to control all the call processing - and the conferencing. When someone calls in, CCXML is driving the overall call flow… initiating the calls to the other users and then bringing them into a shared conference. In turn, SIP is being used for all the connectivity out to the PSTN through our various service providers and VoiceXML is used for the the spoken dialogs you hear in the application. All around a pretty cool use of open standards in the midst of a Facebook application.

We’re also excited because while this application launched initially on Facebook, the Equals folks have built it in such a way that they will be able to move it to OpenSocial and from there allow it to be used on all the many other social networks that will support OpenSocial apps on their systems. They also have a range of other ideas to expand this application that we are looking forward to seeing as they roll those out.

Congrats to the team at Equals on this launch and we look forward to seeing what they do next. If you are on Facebook, please do check out the Party Line app and let us know what you think. (There is also documentation available if you would like more information about the application.) And if you want to learn more about how you could develop on our platform using open standards like I mentioned above, please check out our free developer accounts and software and learn how you can get started today.

Technorati Tags:
applications, facebook, facebook applications, facebook platform, voxeo, equals, social networking, voip, voice, voice applications, voice mashups, sip, prophecy, ccxml, xml, voicexml, ivr, opensocial, party line, conferencing, collaboration

Want to call somewhere and find out where your nearest Ethanol or biodiesel fuel stations are? Thinking about trying out biodiesel but you want to know how feasible it is to get fuel in your area? Well, just in time for Earth Day 2008 tomorrow, a member of our developer community, Mark Headd, has brought out “Project Green Phone” - a very cool voice mashup that integrates Voxeo Prophecy and StrikeIron web services… all through the use of the PHP, ECMAScript (JavaScript), VoiceXML and CCXML. Mark writes about the goals of his project:

• To make use of the Voxeo Prophecy platform, the premiere VoiceXML/CCXML platform for building voice applications (at least in my opinion).

• To code the application entirely in VoiceXML, CCXML, ECMAScript and PHP (that’s right, no database!).
• To integrate with SOAP-based web services to obtain data on E85 and Bi-Diesel station locations, and to do other cool stuff like send an SMS message from VoiceXML.
• To make use of interesting and unique audio files for prompts and to signal specific types of outcomes.
  

All in all it’s a very cool demonstration of integrating our application platform with web services using web programming languages. Mark’s blog has all the info, detailed instructions and code - you are free to download it and try it out yourself. While he focused on finding fuel stations near you, you can obviously modify his code to make use of other web services to obtain other information. (Do note that, like other mashups using phone numbers for location, it may not always work if the number you call in on is from a mobile phone, VoIP service or is in a different region via local number portability.)

Mark indicates he’ll be following this with more posts in the future and we’re looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with! Meanwhile, I’m going to install his app on my local Prophecy box and see where the nearest biodiesel station is to me…

[Standard disclaimer applies here… Voxeo Corp. has no connection to this code and can’t vouch for how it works - we just thought it was a cool use of our platform that we should point out… use at your own risk… if you run out of biodiesel on your way to the station, it’s not our fault… yadda, yadda, yadda… ]

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, voxeo prophecy, prophecy, mashups, voice mashups, voice, geolocation, earth day, environment, strikeiron, biodiesel, ethanol, applications, voicexml, ccxml,php

One of the challenges we have in giving away voice application development services is that for the most part we don’t really know what exactly people do with our platform! If they become a commercial hosted customer, we obviously learn about their application but if it’s done with our premise Prophecy platform, or even a free account on our Evolution portal, we don’t usually know what people are using us for unless they (or someone) tell us or it turns up in one of our searches.

So we were intrigued to learn via a blog post back in March that a developer has launched the “Turnout Machine” using Ruby on Rails and our platform. The blog post has more details, but here’s the piece on the application screen:

• Dare your friends to vote and see if they chicken out.
• We’ll send your friends a txt or give them a phone call on election day reminding them of their promise to vote.

The developer indicates that this is his experiment in looking at “how peer-to-peer connections might be leveraged to create action”. He goes on to talk about the technical side:

The application was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a Joyent Accelerator. The interesting bits from a technical perspective are the txt messaging and telephony support. To send out txt messages I am using Clickatell - an SMS aggregator and service provider. I had never interfaced with their service before, but it turns out there is a gem for Ruby that made it insanely simple. To send out phone calls I had considered using Asterisk, but instead decided on using Voxeo’s hosted VoiceXML platform. This made it easy to get the service up and running quickly without having to think very much about telephony infrastructure. It will also let me do speech recognition if the need ever arises.

It’s great to see he’s using Ruby on Rails to interact with our platform and personally being very interested in all things political I do wish him all the best with his experiment. I do hope he’ll write up how it all worked out for him. (Of course, it sounds like our part (calling people with reminders) doesn’t kick in until the actual Election Day this coming November.) Again, the blog post has more details if you would like to learn more.

Do you have a cool application you have developed using our platform (hosted or premise)? If so, please do drop me a note and let me know. We’re looking to profile more applications here on this blog in the future.

P.S. We don’t know the developer of this application and as the blog post was unsigned we can only guess his name from the About page. If you do choose to actually participate in his Turnout Machine application, it is at your own risk. We just thought it was worth writing about as a cool use of our platform.

Technorati Tags:
ruby, rubyonrails, voxeo, voicexml, applications, politics

Did you miss out on attending eComm 2008 last month? Well now you can at least view the presentations. Shortly after I wrote about our own use of SlideShare I was pleased to get a note from eComm organizer Lee Dryburgh indicating that almost all of the eComm 2008 presentations are now available (also on SlideShare). You can view all the different presentations and download them as well.

Lee also said that he’s working on getting the audio recordings of the presentations up online as podcasts, too, which is good because the audio is really required to understand many of the slide decks.

On that note, as a frequent presenter, I am delighted to see that so many of these eComm 2008 presentations (including RJ’s that I posted earlier) have done away with mindless bullet points and dense slides of text and instead used the slides as a way of complementing the spoken presentation (rather than replacing the spoken presentation as people read the slides). It looks like there were some great presentations there.

While this presentation approach is great in my opinion for attendees, the challenge with this approach is that without the audio the slides don’t mean as much. For instance, here’s this deck which looks quite interesting:

| View | Upload your own

That’s one I’ll probably go get the audio for once Lee gets it up online. This one from longtime VoIP blogger Martin Geddes (also here) also looks quite intriguing:

| View | Upload your own

Many more presentations (58 currently) await your browsing in the eComm 2008 presentation area - which one is your favorite?

Technorati Tags:
eComm, eComm2008, presentations, slideshare, voip, telephony, telecommunications, communication

I’ve long been a fan of SlideShare.net as a tool for sharing presentations and today I’m pleased to announce that we’re now starting to upload public presentations to:

http://www.slideshare.net/voxeo

SlideShare offers capabilities for presentations similar to what YouTube offers for videos: reviews, comments, tags, “related” presentations and much more. They also provide the very nice ability to embed a presentation directly into a web site. Here is an example with a presentation RJ gave last month at Asterisk World 2008 / VON 2008 in San Jose:

| View | Upload your own

What’s also cool is that if we had the audio for a presentation like this, we can sync the audio to the slides so that you can listen and see the slides move with the audio. Here’s an example I did for a VoIP security talk: “The Black Bag Security Review.” You can also download the PDF file for each set of slides if you go to the page on the SlideShare site for the specific presentation (allowing download is an option at SlideShare, but one we’ve enabled for our presentations so far).

We’ve uploaded three current presentations from RJ to our SlideShare area right now and in the months ahead we’ll upload more presentations as we speak at other conferences or just have presentations we’d like to share. (We’ll also add audio when we can.)

What do you think? Do you find seeing presentations in this format useful? Comments about our presentations - or about our use of SlideShare - are definitely welcome.

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, slideshare, presentations, voice, voip