Voxeo Talks

If you will be attending the JavaOne Conference next week stop by The Moscone Center to hear RJ talk about how to build voice mashups with SIP Servlets or just to say hello, we know he is such a social butterfly!  This will be a 60 minute presentation titled “Taking a SIP of Java™ Technology: Building Voice Mashups with SIP Servlets” beginning at 9:45 am in room Esplanade 301.  The abstract of the presentation is:

The Java world has seen more then its fair share of telephony APIs come and go over the years. Things like JAIN SIP, JTAPI, Parlay, JAIN SLEE have been showing up on product road maps for several years now but SIP Servlets (now just released as a 1.1) are now finally seeing some industry wide adoption in application servers both closed and open source. Companies such as IBM     (WebSphere), Redhat (jboss), Sun (glassfish), Oracle, HP and Voxeo (sipmethod) have all recently added support for this standard.

SIP Servlets provide a simple API that mimics the widely deployed HTTP Servlet model allowing for java developers to easily adapt their existing code and framework for communication applications.

This session will provide a short introduction to sip servlets, why developers should pay attention and show people how they can    quickly create a converged application using the technology.

We will also show how you can quickly plug into simple web APIs using SOAP and REST to create quick web mash-ups.

Concluding the session will be information for the attendees to find out more about the technologies discussed and info on what they can do to download and build applications themselves.

This will be a great presentation you won’t want to miss.  You can register here or drop a note to coordinate a meeting outside of the conference.

Today we are very pleased to announce the acquisition of IMified, the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform. What does IMified do? In a very simple way, you can think of IMified as:

IVR for IM

Or as VoIP blogger Dave Michels said to me yesterday, it’s “IVR without the V”.

Think for a moment about the kinds of self-service applications that you might write for voice using a platform such as our Prophecy platform (in hosting or premise) or our Tropo platform. What kind of apps might you write? Perhaps apps like these:

• Auto attendants
• Order status
• Package tracking
• Information retrieval
• Emergency notifications
• Virtual agents
• Instant CRM
• Surveys
• Data entry
• Interactive games
• Identity verification

All of those are possible today with voice and we’ve had over 37,000 developers write apps like those on our platform. But today in 2009:

Why should conversations be limited to voice?

The reality is that today people are engaging in real-time communication not only using voice… but also IM, SMS, web chat, Twitter and so many other means. Now, if you provide self-service applications for your company or organization, why shouldn’t you be able to offer those applications in other channels? Without having to have completely separate development groups and efforts?

We think you should be able to offer your application to your users or customers using whatever channel they like… and you should only have to develop the application once. We call this:

Unified Self-Service

And you’ll be hearing a lot more from us on this theme over the weeks and months ahead. We began speaking about this last year with our acquisition of VoiceObjects which lets you develop your applications once and deploy them out to users on the phone, mobile web, SMS, IM and USSD. Today’s acquisition of IMified further adds to that picture by adding to our portfolio a hosted platform for developing IM-based self-service applications.

IMified provides a simple, scalable web-based platform for creating and hosting interactive instant messaging (IM) agents (Bots) that can interact with all the public IM networks, including AIM (AOL), GTalk (Google), MSN (Microsoft) and Yahoo. Building, managing, and scaling an interactive IM application or “bot” has traditionally been a complex and frustrating task. IMified’s platform removes the complexity and provides a simple yet powerful solution.

But rather than read about it, why not try it out? Here are three examples of IM bots that you can try right now. Simply add one or more of these as a contact using the screen name for whichever IM service your prefer:

Weather Bot
Enter your US zip code and get your local weather.
Jabber/Gtalk: myweather@bot.im
AIM: imifiedweather
Yahoo: imifiedweather

Local Search
Find local restaurants in your area
Jabber/Gtalk: local@bot.im
AIM: findlocal
MSN: findlocal@live.com

URL Shortener
Enter a url and have it shortened using the bit.ly api
Jabber/Gtalk: shorter@bot.im
AIM: shorterurl
MSN: shorterurl@live.com

These are obviously quick examples, but imagine what you could do with connecting this type of service to, say, your order tracking system? And rather than “imagining” it, why not head over to IMified.com, sign up for a free developer account and start building that application?

If you would like more info about the IMified acquisition, we’ve put a FAQ online. I also interviewed IMified co-founder Adam Kalsey here:

We’re excited to welcome the IMified team to Voxeo – and we’re looking forward to continuing to offer even more capabilities to our customers to develop and deploy self-service applications across many different channels!

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, imified, im, ivr, self-service, unified self-service

In preparing for our announcement of our acquisition of IMified, we found that we were frequently asked certain questions about the acquisition – so naturally we created a FAQ. We hope these Q & A answer many of your questions and if not, please do leave us additional questions as comments.

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Q: What does the IMified service do? What do people do with it?

A: IMified offers a simple, web-based platform that enables companies and developers to write an instant messaging (IM) application once and connect it to all the public IM networks, including AIM (AOL), GTalk (Google), MSN (Microsoft) and Yahoo.

IMified provides a scalable platform for creating and hosting interactive instant messaging (IM) agents (Bots). Building, managing, and scaling an interactive IM application or “bot” has traditionally been a complex and frustrating task. IMified’s solution removes the complexity and provides a simple solution for building and deploying IM applications on multiple public IM networks using one API.

Examples of applications using IMified’s platform include:

• Information retrieval
• Emergency notifications
• Order status
• Package tracking
• Virtual agents
• Auto attendants
• Instant CRM
• Surveys
• Data entry
• Interactive games
• Identity verification

Here is how it can work (and this is a working example):

• In your Jabber/GTalk IM client, you add “myweather@bot.im” to your list of contacts.
• When you want to know the weather, you simply send an IM message to “myweather@bot.im” with your US ZIP code.
• The IM message you receive back would have the most recent weather forecast for that ZIP code.

The IM interaction could involve a simple exchange of information or could involve many different steps.

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Q: Why did Voxeo acquire IMified?

A: In order to continue providing our customers with the best platform on which to develop Unified Communications and Unified Self-Service applications, we are always looking for ways to extend the capabilities of that platform.

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Q: How will IMified integrate with Voxeo’s existing products?

A: It’s too early to speak about precise integration plans, but you could obviously see some expanded IM capabilities added to our platform.

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Q: What is that status of the IMified employees?

A: The IMified employees are all now members of the Voxeo R&D organization, reporting in to Wei Chen.

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Q: Who are some of IMified’s customers?

A: As the IMified service is currently in Beta, the service has been freely available to developers and so far over 7,500 developers have signed up. We can’t disclose company names, but we can say that companies using the IMified platform include a large auction website, a major weather website, a major discount travel website, and many more…

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Q: What will happen with the existing IMified site and service?

A: No changes will be made at this time. Existing customers will still be able to use their IMified applications with no interruption to service.

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Q: Can developers still sign up?

A: Sure, just go to http://www.imified.com/ to get started. Developer accounts are free.

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Q: How are IMified applications developed?

A: Developing an IMified application is quick and easy. First, create a web application that will interact with IMified’s service via HTTP. Use whatever programming language you like and the IMified web services API as documented here: http://new.imified.com/developers/api Then place your application on a publicly accessible web server.

Next, login to your IMified.com account, add a new application to your account and choose a name for the bot. Configure that application to point to the URL of your application. By default your bot will be accessible to Jabber/GTalk users. You can go into the “Network Settings” for the bot to add connections to the AIM, MSN or Yahoo IM networks.

That’s it! Now users simply add the bot as a contact in their IM service and start interacting.

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Q: When was the company founded? When did it launch the IMified developer platform?

A: The company was founded Feb 2007. The developer platform was launched in Oct 2007.

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Q: What were the terms of the deal?

A: C’mon… you know we won’t answer that! As a private company acquiring another private company, we don’t disclose terms of the acquisition. We can say that the amount involved was greater than $1 and less than $1 billion.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, im, imified, acquisitions

If any of you will be attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 22-25, 2009, I’ll be there and always enjoy connecting with people who read this blog. I’m speaking as part of a keynote panel at 9:15am on Wednesday, June 24, on “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise“. The abstract of the panel is this:

The rapid rise of social messaging services such as Twitter creates challenges and opportunities for end-user organizations. How can end-user organizations utilize social messaging to improve external and internal collaboration? What’s the role of social messaging in a unified communications and collaboration architecture and how are UC&C vendors incorporating social messaging into their products? How can organizations embrace social messaging in a way that is consistent with needs for security, governance and compliance? Will the rise of public social messaging services render investments in unified communications moot? Join us for a free-wheeling discussion into the all of these topics and more.

The session, moderated by Nemertes analyst Irwin Lazar, will include a range of panelists:

• Joe Burton, Cisco, Vice President and CTO, Voice Technology Group
• Fernando Egea, Alcatel-Lucent, Senior Director, Solution Architect
• Laura Fitton, Pistachio Consulting, Principal
• Mike Gotta, Burton Group, Principal Analyst
• David Marshak, IBM Lotus Software, Senior Product Manager, Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC2)
• Dan York, Voxeo, Director of Conversations
• Tim Young, Socialcast, Founder & CEO

It should be a fun group to have this conversation with – although with 7 of us (plus Irwin) in a 45-minute block, we’ll have to see how much of a conversation we really get to have. I’m also very much looking forward to many of the other sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

If you are going to be at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, please do drop me a note. If you are thinking about going to the conference, you can register using promotion code CNACEB03 and get a 20% discount on the show fee, or a free pass to the exhibit area and keynotes.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, e2conf, enterprise, enterprise2.0, social media, twitter, boston, dan york

Like many companies out there, we have been continuing to experiment with using a Facebook “Page” as another way to engage in conversations with customers, developers, users, etc. A challenge, though, is that the URL to the Voxeo page on Facebook doesn’t exactly roll of your tongue:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Voxeo/31673279702

Now, Facebook has started to experiment with offering “vanity URLs” (something like “http://www.facebook.com/Voxeo”) but so far such URLs seem to be very limited to only special partners of Facebook.

So since there seems to be no way for us to simplify the Facebook.com URL, we just made our own:

http://www.voxeo.com/facebook

So if you are a Facebook user, please do feel free to check out our page. (And hey, why not “Become a Fan”?) Over the weeks and months ahead we will be continuing to experiment more with using it as a communication and conversation tool.

P.S. And to that end, as well, if you know of examples of Facebook Pages you have found work really well, please do let us know. I’m always curious to see what others are doing.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, facebook

Back in August 2008 at the SpeechTEK conference in New York, we were recognized as Speech Technology Magazine’s 2008 Market Leader in the Speech Self-Service Suite category. As our news release at the time stated:

Speech Technology magazine determines category winners as decided by the editors of Speech Technology magazine and a panel of experts from the academic, consulting, and analyst communities.. Companies were scored in key areas, including customer satisfaction, depth of functionality, company direction, accuracy, cost, and ease of use.

“Recipients of the Speech Technology Magazine’s Speech Industry Awards are recognized for accomplishments that stand out from the crowd,” says David Myron, editorial director of Speech Technology magazine. “They have distinguished themselves through their individual accomplishments, service to the industry and the implementation of truly innovative new applications using speech technology.”

Voxeo’s focus on removing the cost and complexity barriers to speech application adoption and improving the business case for speech applications is cited as the leading reason Voxeo was selected as the Speech Self-Service Suite category leader. Voxeo earned an industry-leading score of 4.5 out of 5.0 for cost and 4.4 out of 5.0 for ease of use. Additionally, the company led the industry with a 4.5 score in customer satisfaction.

In uploading some videos to YouTube recently, I discovered that just last month (April 2009), a video interview from the SpeechTEK show floor with Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor has been posted. Here you can listen to Speech Technology Magazine’s David Myron talk to Jonathan about the award:

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, speechtek, speechtechmagazine, awards, voice, self-service, jonathan taylor

Today we are pleased to announce that industry analyst firm Datamonitor named Voxeo as one of only two vendors on their “shortlist” for enterprise IVR vendors. Datamonitor’s report, titled “Decision Matrix: Selecting an IVR Vendor in the Enterprise” analyzed offerings from Voxeo, Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, Convergys/Intervoice, Genesys and Nortel. In the end, their conclusion was:

“Genesys and Voxeo are in Datamonitor’s ‘shortlist’ category and are considered to be the current leaders in the IVR market. These competitors have received the highest overall scores for the technology assessment and both scored well in the end-user sentiment ratings.”

Given our intense focus on providing Extreme Support and our goal of providing the best platform for developing voice applications, we were also pleased to see this statement:

Voxeo has received some of the highest scores in the end-user sentiment radar, particularly in the areas of service levels, customer support and client engagement. Voxeo achieved top scores for platform features and capabilities as well as development tools.

The report goes into a great amount of detail about all of the vendors – their strengths, weaknesses, capabilities and more. It makes for good reading if you are considering new investments in IVR technology.

But you don’t have to trust us – you can download the Datamonitor report for free and read it yourself.

We have spent a great amount of time, energy and resources on offering customers an outstanding platform upon which to develop IVR, Unified Communications, Self-Service and other voice/communications applications. We are pleased to see that recognized by Datamonitor.

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Technorati Tags: datamonitor, ivr, voxeo, genesys, aspect, avaya, cisco, convergys, intervoice, nortel, communications, voice, self-service

AVIOS, which stands for Applied Voice Input/Output Society, kicked off their fourth annual student speech application contest today. Voxeo is a sponsor, along with Cepstral, I6Net, Loquendo and Microsoft.

Cash and equipment totaling more than $1000 is up for grabs by the student programmer teams that best showcase the power of speech recognition and speech synthesis in their applications. Judges are looking for applications that are robust, useful, creative, innovative and user friendly.

Students may build their speech-enabled apps for free using Voxeo’s 100% compliant VoiceXML Prophecy Platform or hosted Evolution Developer Portal.  The developer portal includes extensive documentation, tutorials, sample code and tools such as real-time logging and debugging. Voxeo also provides free 24×7 tech support.

Alternatively, Voxeo welcomes students to go to www.tropo.com to build applications in Groovy, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby.  Check out our Tropo documentation and sample apps or read the Tropo blog for tips and ideas.  Other development platforms are available to students too. See the full list.

High school, college and university students worldwide may participate in the contest. The deadline to register is November 30, 2009 and applications most be submitted by January 15, 2010. Winners will be announced at the Voice Search Conference in San Diego in March 2010.

Are you a student who would like to get started? Download a copy of the AVIOS contest entry form now and learn more about building your application with Voxeo.

Want to learn more about what Voxeo is doing these days? Or about how our acquisitions of VoiceObjects and MicroMethod fit into our overall plans?

Back in early February, I (Dan York) was down at the Internet Telephony Expo (ITEXPO) East 2009 show in Miami and sat down with TMC’s Eric Linask to talk about what is new with Voxeo.

I recently noticed that TMC has added the ability to embed their videos, so while you can also view the video on TMC’s site, I thought I’d also share it here.

I should note that this video is now three months old, so some of the numbers I shared here are no longer correct (ex. we now have had over 35,000 developers build voice apps in our Evolution Developer Portal), but overall the information is still accurate. (Well, my title has since changed to “Director of Conversations”…)

If you are planning to be out at the ITEXPO West 2009 in September in Los Angeles, you’ll probably also find me there…

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