Voxeo Talks

Today over on his Tech News Comments blog, Markus Göbel writes about how he uses an application on our Evolution site as a bridge from Skype to the phone network. People who call him on his Skype ID ring him on his desk phone or cell phone. It’s a great little demonstration of our transfer capabilities.

Markus also wonders what I think about this solution, especially given that I had written about Skype’s lack of interoperability on my Disruptive Telephony blog earlier this year. Well, first off, I’m delighted that Markus is experimenting with our platform and we do appreciate his kind words and writing about his experience. We’re glad to see he liked our Designer tool. We’ve put a lot of work into making that an easy and simple way to create voice applications without requiring you to learn all the intricacies of VoiceXML.

Second, he’s right that I’ve known about the “Skype-to-phone” capabilities of our platform and in fact I’ve used it for some of my own applications that I’ve developed on our platform. I just haven’t written about it on any of my blogs for two reasons:

1. The inbound Skype connection is there to allow our developers to build interesting applications for Skype; and
2. The connection is only one-way and doesn’t provide the full interoperability that I was writing about.

Let me hit each of these points separately. First, one of the coolest things to me about developing voice apps on our Evolution hosted platform is how incredibly easy it is have an app that can be reached from a range of different sources. As shown in the diagram to the right, any application you create can be reached through the following methods:

• Direct dial across the PSTN to a direct phone number (and applications can be assigned more than one number - for instance if you wanted numbers in different area codes)

• Dialing across the PSTN to an 800-number with a PIN code.
• Dialing across the PSTN to a non-800-number with a PIN code (which I didn’t show in the diagram)
• Inbound connections from SIP endpoints
• Inbound connections from Skype users
• Inbound connections from FWD (formerly FreeWorldDiallup)

Any of you reading this can try it out - just follow our Quick Start Guide. Skype is one of the ways that you can connect to whatever kind of application you create. As an example, here are the contact numbers for a small application of mine (a call-in comment line for my Blue Box podcast):

Pretty cool stuff, eh? Of the many things you can do with your application, you can of course make outbound transfers to the following services:

• Regular PSTN phone numbers (note that free Evolution developer accounts are restricted to making calls within the USA)

• SIP endpoints (including FWD users)

Note that outbound dialing is not enabled by default but if you email our support team we will issue you a “token” that you can use for outbound calling from your app.

What Markus did was create a very simple app that did an outbound transfer over SIP to a service which then rang his various phones. (As he is in Germany, the free Evolution accounts could presumably not call his number directly. Paid Evolution accounts, can, of course, call anywhere and pay the corresponding rates.) Calls can come in via Skype (or other means) and go out via SIP.

So if this is a “Skype-to-SIP” gateway, why aren’t we trumpeting it to the world? Simple… that’s not the purpose of the Skype connection. The inbound connection from Skype is to allow the 30,000+ developers on Evolution to build interesting apps that can work with Skype. Sure, you can obviously create a simple Skype to SIP “transfer” application like Markus did, but that’s not why Skype created the connection with us and if all we used it for was Skype-to-SIP transfers probably at some point Skype might clamp down on the usage. So while it certainly can be done, we ask people to understand the real reason we have the connection and to please not abuse that.

The second reason I personally haven’t written about this capability is because it’s not a full Skype interoperability solution. If you look on the right side of the diagram above, what’s missing? We can accept inbound connections from Skype (which is admittedly very cool for our apps), but we can’t do outbound connections to Skype users. If you look back at my article about Skype interop what I want is the ability to make SIP connections from within the Skype client itself. In contrast to Markus, who is now delighted that he can turn off his Skype client yet still receive calls to his ID, I want to use the Skype client and be able to call SIP endpoints.

In any event, I’m delighted that Markus is trying out our platform. He concludes his piece with:

Let’s see which other solutions I can develop with Voxeo. Their visual tool makes the design of VoiceXML fairly easy.

I, too, look forward to seeing what other solutions he’ll develop!

Technorati Tags:
skype, sip, voxeo, applications, xml, voicexml, fwd

Tags: sip, Skype, Voxeo

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