Voxeo Talks

Calling all German-speakers! Would you like to learn about Voxeo’s platform for developing voice/IVR applications… auf Deutsch?

Being a global company we do periodically offer webinars in languages other than English and with our VoiceObjects team right there in Germany, it is rather obvious that German would be one of those languages.

So if you are in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, are part of a German company or just want to learn about our products in German, please join us:

Voxeo – Sprachanwendungen auf modernen IVR-Plattformen – Schnell, zuverlässig, kosteneffzient

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM CEST

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/569322645

Space is limited, so please do sign up soon. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining the session.

For those of you interested, here is German text of the webinar invitation:

In diesem Webinar möchten wir Ihnen zeigen, wie Sie mit Hilfe standard-basierter Hosting- und On-Premise-Plattformen ein breites Spektrum von Telefonieanwendungen – sprachgesteuerte Self Services, Call Routing, Mehrwertdienste, Benachrichtigungen und mehr – nutzen können. Erfahren Sie, wie Sie durch den Einsatz der IVR-Lösungen von Voxeo Ihren Kundenservice verbessern und gleichzeitig die Kosten senken können:

Flexibilität – IVR on premise, oder doch lieber hosted? Variable Hosting- und On-Premise-Modelle ermöglichen es, Telefonanwendungen jeder Größe und Komplexität wirtschaftlich zu erstellen und zu betreiben. Wir diskutieren auch den hybriden Ansatz, in dem saisonal oder tageszeitlich erhöhte Anrufaufkommen durch Zuschaltung einer Hosted IVR abgebildet werden können.

Verfügbarkeit – Wir garantieren 100% Verfügbarkeit, 24×7. Voxeo’s Hosted IVR ist voll redundant ausgelegt über mehrere, weltweit verteilte Rechenzentren.

Analyse und Transparenz – Die IVR als Black Box? Nicht mit der Technologie von VoiceObjects. Sie bekommen Informationen darüber, wie Ihre Kunden Selfservices nutzen, wie bevorzugte Navigationspfade in der IVR aussehen, und wir messen die tatsächlichen Erfolgs- und Automatisierungsraten. In Kombination mit Ihrem CRM System erhalten Sie damit eine wertvolle Ergänzung für Ihre Kundenanalysen.

Jenseits von IVR – Wir schauen über den Tellerrand. Ideen und Lösungen zur Entwicklung von Unified Self-Services – eine Anwendung, mehrere Kanäle (z.B. Voice, Texting, mobiles Web, …)

Please do join us (assuming, of course, you can understand German).

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, voiceobjects, webinars, ivr, voip, telephony, telecommunications

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Over on the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) blog, organizer Lee Dryburgh has started releasing videos of the eComm 2009 presentations. All the presentations were recorded and are currently going through post-production to be uploaded to the eComm site. Lee indicates that they’ll be released over on the eComm blog as they are post-produced over the weeks and months ahead.

The first one out is the fun presentation by Ge Wang, called New Expressive Social Mediums on the iPhone which talked about his work at Smule to produce iPhone applications like the virtual lighter and more importantly the Ocarina musical application. I enjoyed his presentation because it was, well, just so different from what you typically find at conferences in our space. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

And okay, how many of you went to your iPhone and bought Ocarina?

Keep an eye on the eComm blog to see more videos appearing soon…

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, apple, iphone, smule, ocarina, ge wang

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We’re very pleased to note that Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn will be speaking early next Tuesday morning at VoiceCon Orlando 2009 on the subject of voice mashups. His panel session is “Voice Mashups – Tool or Toy?” and is from 8:00-8:45am on Tuesday, March 31st. The description is:

What’s a voice mashup, and why should you care? This session will explain how different application and services elements can be combined in an ad hoc manner by end users drawing upon enterprise resources, to create “mashups.” We’ll look at the uses for mashups, where the elements of a mashup come from, and how they can benefit your end users.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• How do you get started with voice mashups? What elements will you need to purchase, and what existing elements in your network can be included?

• What do you have to do to make elements available for mashups?
• What’s the users’ interface for a voice mashup, and how do you provide it to them?
• Do you need to maintain some control over what users do within a mashup-enabled Web Services environment?
• Why should you do this? What can voice mashups do for your end users that can’t be done another way?

The folks at VoiceCon asked both RJ and the other presenter, Marlon Machado from IBM, to actually show mashups in action, so I know RJ’s going to have some fun stuff planned. I expect he’ll be doing some demos of Tropo.com (here’s a good summary of our Tropo announcements) and showing some of the cool mashups we’ve come up with, some of which are found in the Tropo Sample Applications and some of which we’ve written about on the Tropo blog. RJ’s a great presenter and if you are at VoiceCon I’d encourage you to check out his presentation.

P.S. And yes, if you looked at the VoiceCon schedule earlier, I (Dan York) was slated to give this presentation but due to some scheduling issues cannot attend. RJ graciously agreed to speak in my place. Given that he’s been heavily involved in mashups for years, he’s definitely got the background.

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Technorati Tags: voicecon, voxeo, rjauburn, mashups, voice, applications

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If you visited the VoiceObjects home page today, you may have noticed a new change.[1] Yes, indeed, our talented web team introduced some new changes including the spiffy logo seen over on the right.

We’re quite pleased with how the logo came out and look forward to introducing it throughout the VoiceObjects site and materials. Watch for more changes, too, coming across all of our sites. We’ve got some great things in the queue…

[1] And if you haven’t visited the VO page lately, why not check it out?

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects

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This Thursday, March 19, 2009, we are very pleased to be hosting the monthly meeting of the Orlando Ruby Users Group. We’ll be showing people the Ruby interface to Tropo.com, looking at some of the Tropo sample applications in Ruby and talking about how Ruby can now be used to create all sorts of different applications that interact with voice, IM and SMS.

The evening will start with gathering downstairs at street level in the Urban Flats restaurant at 6:00pm for dinner. At 7:00pm the group will head upstairs to our office on the 20th floor. In his announcement to the ORUG mailing list, ORUG organizer Gregg Pollack indicates that if you are arriving after 7pm you should call him at 407-754-5517 so that you can be let into our office.

Our office is at 189 South Orange Avenue in downtown Orlando, FL (the “Plaza” building at the corner of Church and South Orange). There is a parking garage in the actual building where you can pay to park – enter on Church Street. There are several other parking garages in the area. A map and directions are available online.

We’re glad to host local events like this and look forward to seeing what this group of Rubyists will do with Tropo!

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Technorati Tags: ruby, orlando, orug, voxeo, tropo

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It seems rather amazing that it was only a week ago at eComm 2009 that we announced the launch of Tropo.com, Voxeo’s new platform for developing voice applications in common programming languages such as JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby.

It’s been a crazy yet wonderful week! We’ve been thrilled by all the positive feedback we’ve received and even more so by the number of Tropo developers we’ve seen sign up. If you missed out on the announcement last week, here are some pointers to learn more:

• a video of Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor announcing Tropo at eComm and the set of slides that accompanied the launch

• the Tropo.com website where you can sign up for a free developer account and also learn about the simple pricing
• the Tropo documentation, including the quick introduction, the API Reference and the Tutorials
• slides from the Tropo tutorial given by Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn at eComm
• over 140 sample Tropo applications written in JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby and covering a range of different application types. Some voice-centric apps like an auto-attendant… some voice mashups that give you voice access to certain services (like traffic reports, top music download lists, New York Times articles)… and some, um, “interesting” apps like the Monty Python quote server or the role-playing game someone wrote. We also announced the availability of these applications via git and Github.
• a developer contest where we will pay $100 for each selected sample app
• the Tropo FAQ which answers many questions we’ve received
• new ways to receive support for writing Tropo apps, including web forums, IRC and Skype chat
• and, of course, The Tropo Blog, where we’ll be bringing you all sorts of news about Tropo, examples of applications, sample code and much, much more.

Here at Voxeo we’ve been very excited about the reception of the Tropo launch and are already looking at how we can enhance the platform and what additional languages we’ll be adding (believe it or not, we’ve had several requests for Lisp!). We do hope that you will sign up for a free Tropo account and get started creating voice applications in programming languages you already know. And please… do send along any feedback you have, either through the web forums, as comments to this blog post or even as email. We’d love to hear what you think of it and also where you would like to see the Tropo platform go. Most of all we’re excited to see what you do with the platform!

P.S. And if you would rather develop voice apps in VoiceXML, CCXML or CallXML, you can of course sign up for a free developer account at our evolution.voxeo.com developer portal and get started there. With the launch of Tropo we are in no way reducing our award-winning support for XML telephony. We’ll be continuing to enhance and expand XML support as well… but with Tropo we’re now opening up development of voice applications to a whole new range of developers.

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Technorati Tags: tropo, voxeo, voice, applications, mashups, ecomm, python, php, javascript, groovy, ruby

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A great aspect of eComm last week was that it had the services of an excellent photographer, James Duncan Davidson, who uploaded a series of eComm 2009 photographs:

Duncan, who was also one of the photographers at TED (and captured the now-famous image of Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes) provided some excellent photos of each of the many speakers at eComm. Here are some of (Voxeo CEO) Jonathan Taylor (click on any of these images to jump to larger versions in James’ photo collection):

Here are some of me (Dan York):

And here are some of (Voxeo CTO) RJ Auburn:

(Note that in all cases I am sending you to the first photo of the set in James Duncan Davidson’s collection – you can click on the other thumbnails on the right side to see the other images larger.)

From a speaker’s perspective, I have to say that it’s also great that Duncan will allow us to use these shots for our blog sites, social networking images, etc., basically any use except “commercial” usage such as brochures, etc. It’s nice as a speaker to have photos like these available.

He was also just a really nice guy and we had a couple of great conversations about photography, his use of Apple TV to display photos in the hallways, and other topics. You can find him online at his main website or his photo gallery.

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, photos, images, photography, duncandavidson

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At 12:27-and-a-half Pacific today (and yes, eComm organizer Lee Dryburgh insisted on the “half”), we will be announcing a new and powerful way to create voice applications…. that’s all I’m going to say for now…

But at that time, I’m going to try live-streaming out of here (let’s see just how good the eComm WiFi network is!) on uStream. You can watch at:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/voxeo-ecomm-launch

Hopefully that will all work fine, but if that doesn’t work, we’ll have the video up later today. The presentation will run 7.5 minutes.

Also, stay tuned to our main blog site: http://blogs.voxeo.com/

You’ll see some announcements there around the time

If you are interested in developing voice applications… voice mashups… etc…. I expect you’ll be quite pleased with what we are announcing…

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Technorati Tags: applications, voice, voxeo, voip, mashups, development, programming

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