Voxeo Talks

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Do you remember the 1992 movie “Sneakers”? At one point the main characters are trying to get into a place, but first need to get through a voice verification system.  So they create a recording: “My name is Werner Brandis. My voice is my password. Verify me.” Voila! Since this is Hollywood, access is granted. A real-world, modern-day version of this type of technology is now available on the Voxeo Prophecy IVR Hosting platform – only unlike the movie, it can’t easily be spoofed!

Earlier this week, we announced the delivery of VoiceVerified’s voice authentication services on our platform.  Using their “Unforgettable Password(TM)” technology, the solution provides consumers with a more convenient and secure way to obtain sensitive information or perform transactions over the phone. Callers no longer need to remember PINs and passwords or divulge personal information such as their social security number or mother’s maiden name. Instead consumers can authenticate using their unique voice print.  And, unlike the voice verification system in “Sneakers”, VoiceVerified’s system asks the caller to authenticate by repeating a randomly generated series of numbers, eliminating the kind of “replay attack” that helped the heroes of Sneakers.  

We think it’s a great solution and we’re pleased to be working with VoiceVerified.  We’ve also published a case study that highlights some of the reasons why VoiceVerified selected Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Hosting services.  You can check out VoiceVerified’s web site for more information about their products and services or contact them via email to learn about using their services with our platform.

What do you think? Do you see a role for voice verification services with your applications?

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