Voxeo Talks

Empower’s 2009 Empower & Innovate User Conference kicks off this Wednesday, April 29th at the Hilton Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.  A long time Voxeo partner, Empower is a top provider of workforce management and time automation solutions. The company has helped over 3,000 organizations spanning 9,000 locations enhance the performance of employees, managers, and overall operations. Empower products are responsible for accurately calculating time for more than 20 million paychecks annually.

Companies can easily integrate Voxeo IVR with Empower solutions to voice-enable tasks such as timekeeping and attendance tracking.  HR departments can further leverage the value of Voxeo to automate processes, improve satisfaction and lower expenses. Common applications include:

• Self-service benefits enrollment
• Automated job screening
• Job hotlines
• Employee surveys
• Information lines
• Employee notification messages

Voxeo is exhibiting at this week’s conference, so please stop by to say hello if you’ll be there too. For more information about Empower, visit www.empagio.com. 

Do you worry about identity theft? Have you had your personal identification information or credit cards stolen and worry that someone could be out taking out extra credit lines in your name? Or committing fraud and ruining your credit status?

Today identity theft is an increasingly large problem and banks and financial institutions, among others, are looking at ways to better secure their interactions with customers. In the security space, we generally talk about authentication as involving one of these factors:

• something you know, such as a password or PIN

• something you have, such as a token or pass card
• something you are, such as a fingerprint, retina, or… voice

Done well, this last category is perhaps the most secure because it is something about you that cannot easily be duplicated. So to that end, we are pleased to announced that Voxeo and TradeHarbor are partnering to bring TradeHarbor’s Voice Signature Service to customers developing applications on Voxeo’s Prophecy premise product or on Voxeo’s Prophecy Hosting cloud. The press release describes the process a bit:

When an enrolled user calls an application protected with the Voice Signature Service, they are prompted to repeat a dynamically-presented phrase. Voice Signatures are used to conveniently authenticate inbound telephone calls or, using outbound calls, web transactions from computers or mobile devices. The Voice Signature Service then returns a patent-pending Normalized Detector Scale® confidence score that can be used as a decision support factor in allowing or denying account access; it also maintains an audit trail, which provides unprecedented accountability. The entire authentication process takes just seconds.

You can visit TradeHarbor’s website, www.tradeharbor.com, to learn more about their offering. If you would like to find out more about how you can use TradeHarbor’s voice authentication services with your application on Voxeo’s platform, please contact our sales team at sales@voxeo.com

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Technorati Tags: voice, voicebiometrics, biometrics, security, authentication, identification, voxeo, tradeharbor

If any of you are at Genesys’ G-Force conference this week in Orlando, Florida, please do stop by the “Partner Pavilion” exhibit area and check out what our VoiceObjects team is there to demonstrate.

Given that we (Voxeo) compete rather directly with Genesys on an application platform level, you might wonder why we are there at their conference (and in fact are a sponsor as VoiceObjects).

The reality is that while our VoiceObjects service creation environment works wonderfully with our own Prophecy platform, it also works great with over 40 other IVR platforms, including Genesys’.

In fact, the beautiful part about using VoiceObjects as a development tool is that you are able to develop your applications completely separately from the IVR platform that actually executes your applications. Develop on VO and then deploy on Voxeo Prophecy, Genesys, Cisco, Intervoice, HP, Avaya, Nortel or other platforms.

Your development tool does not lock you into your deployment platform!

We see this as a great strength compared to so many of the other application development tools out there that wind up only working with usually a single application platform. Why limit yourself?

So we do have customers using VoiceObjects with the Genesys platform and in that light we are over at the G-Force conference this week talking with partners and customers about the power of VoiceObjects as a development tool. If you are there at the show, please do stop by the Partner Pavilion and say hello.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, genesys, g-force, conferences

We just had a big party for my son’s 11th birthday. When all was said and done he had close to $200 in Visa cash and gift cards from Toy R Us, BestBuy, and Target (although he gave this one to his mom, sweet boy).  Prepaid cards have become so popular that we can now walk into the local grocery or convenience store and select from at least a dozen options. Gift giving has never been easier. 

But in the midst of this growth, one payment transaction processing company struggled to quickly deploy new prepaid card programs for their clients. They turned to Voxeo and Chrysalis Software to ease the administration headaches associated with developing and managing client-specific IVR applications that give cardholders automated phone access to information such as account balances and recent transactions.

Prior to Voxeo and Chrysalis, the transaction processing company had to rely on a third party vendor who took weeks to put a custom self-service IVR application in place. We reduced that to minutes and lowered operating costs by implementing a simple web interface that put our customer in control. Equally important was the fact that Voxeo’s hosting solution provides reliability (with a 100% uptime guarantee) and the ability to cost-effectively handle bursts in traffic – like during Christmas or Teacher Appreciation Week when gift card giving is in full swing.

Read more about the solution in our new case study.

Like all marketing people, I love a good customer testimonial. It’s no big secret that many of the quotes that marketers feature in case studies and press releases start with a customer comment that is then tweaked, massaged and put back in front of the customer for approval. While these types of testimonials are extremely important and greatly appreciated, I was recently reminded that accolades are often best when they are unprompted and in the customer’s own words.

Voxeo talks a lot about our 24×7 Extreme Support. We can write engaging copy about how we stop at nothing to make customers happy or how our support engineers are VoiceXML-certified developers. We can work with customers to craft perfectly phrased recounts of their customer service experience. But nothing beats the real deal.

Voxeo’s Extreme Support team forwarded me a collection of unsolicited feedback. Here are some of the raw comments included in those emails and support tickets.

“Voxeo’s commitment to not just excellent performance, but to flawless performance… to not just near 100% success rate, but to a perfect success rate… is essential to our product.” 

“I gotta say you guys are unquestionably the best support team in the industry.”

“Voxeo and Voxeo support is freaking incredible…. Wow and you can quote me on that.”

“Voxeo Rules!”

“THANK YOU for such wonderful support.  I can’t remember the last time I experienced support like this, even when paying premium rates.  Your department is definitely unique.  I truly appreciate all the help and look forward to working with you in the future.”

“Thanks for the quick response.  Your support is fantastic.”

“Thanks for the speedy response (I’m impressed)!”

“Can I just simply say: You, guys, ROCK!”

“This is one of my best experiences EVER of getting comprehensive answers, quick replies, professional support on any question I have with your product. It’s being a real pleasure to do business with you.”

“Wow, you guys really go on beyond the call (pun intended).”

“As usual, you were right on, right away.”

“WOW you guys are FAST ”

We love getting comments – both positive and negative – and it was great to see this list from Support.  (And if you come across some of these quotes in future marketing materials, I’m telling you now they are real!)

If you aren’t a customer and want to experience Voxeo Extreme Support first hand, download Prophecy, try our VoiceObjects application platform, or sign up for Voxeo’s Evolution developer portal. Getting started with our products is free and so is our 24×7 developer support. 

FYI, the folks over at Speech Technology Magazine have published a new supplement on “The Importance of Testing, Tuning and Tools“. Voxeo is one of the sponsors of that supplement and we encourage you to check out our article about our tools.

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Technorati Tags: speechtechmag, speech, speechtech, speech technology, voxeo, tools, voiceobjects

I was pleased to recently receive word that one of the proposals we had submitted to O’Reilly’s 2009 Open Source Convention (OSCON) was accepted. To my surprise, it was not one of the proposals we had submitted about the new simplicity of bringing voice into applications, such as through using open source programs and languages like python, PHP, etc. with voice via Tropo.com.

Instead it was a completely different proposal I’d put in called “Building a Corporate Blog Portal Using WordPress MU“. In the presentation, I plan to share some of what we’ve learned through building blogs.voxeo.com on top of the open source WordPress MU. I’ve documented many of our challenges and learnings in our Behind The Blog weblog and I’ll continue to do so as we continue to evolve the platform. Overall it’s been a positive experience because we have had the control to be able to truly shape the blog portal in the way that we want it to be. It has, of course, involved a good bit of work.

Anyway, if any of you will be out at OSCON 2009, July 20-24 in San Jose, CA, here’s what you can expect to hear me talk about:

Do you want to create a blog portal for your company or organization that includes multiple blogs and/or podcasts? Do you want to do so in a way that gives you the maximum amount of control over how the portal looks? And doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to implement?

While many people may be familiar with the open source WordPress blogging software, this presentation will focus on WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU or WPMU), the open source multi-blogging software platform used for such high-traffic sites as WordPress.com. Presenter Dan York will draw on his own experience implementing WPMU for a corporate blogging platform and discuss topics such as:

• Checklist for getting started with WordPress MU
• Things to think about up front before starting
• Policy decisions around blog creation: who can create them, etc.
• Developing a common, branded look-and-feel
• Security issues associated with using WPMU
• Plugins that add value
• Integrating with other social media sites and services
• Educating users and helping authors get going

Attendees will leave with an understanding of how to return and get started with exploring a WordPress MU installation, along with tips to make it work smoothly and pitfalls to avoid. Come with your questions and prepare to return and start blogging!

Me being who I am, you can be sure that I’ll make whatever content I can (such as slides, etc.) available through this site.

You can also be sure that I’ll also see about having a BOF or other perhaps informal session out there about developing voice apps on Tropo.com. If you’ve never been to an OSCON, due check out OSCON 2009… I’ve been to several and they’ve been great shows.

And stay tuned for more info in the months ahead…

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, danyork, voxeo, oscon, oscon2009, oreilly, blogging, blogportals, socialmedia

As Jason Goecke notes over on his blog in a post, “Adhearsion Website and Sandbox Migration Complete“, we are now providing hosting to the Adhearsion project‘s “Sandbox” service as part of our general interest in helping open source projects we find interesting.

Adhearsion is a framework that Ruby developers can use to easily write voice apps that work with Asterisk. The Adhearsion team now has a hosted offering that helps developers get started. As Jason explains:

We have also moved the Sandbox to a new hosted server. Our friends at Voxeo have provided a great server for us and are now sponsoring the Adhearsion Sandbox. It is great to have a visionary leader in the telephony cloud space involved with the Adhearsion community.

Jason and his partner Jay Phillips have both been working with us on our Tropo voice application platform, in particular on the Ruby side of things, and we’re glad to help them out with their project. Jason says it perhaps the best toward the end of his post:

Our goal is to lower all the barriers to make it easy for developers to realize the possibilities of voice in modern web development.

We share that goal – and it’s been part of our corporate DNA since our founding in 1999. We’re always glad to work with those who agree – and look forward to providing even more options in the future.

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FYI, this afternoon I upgraded blogs.voxeo.com to the latest 2.7 version of WordPress MU. While everything looks fine in my testing, if you do notice anything on the site that doesn’t work like you think it should, please do leave a comment here on this blog post – or email me.

Now I am just looking forward to getting back to writing…

P.S. For those interested in WordPress, I wrote a post diving into the details of the upgrade from WordPress MU 2.6.2 to 2.7.

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