Voxeo acquires IMified – and gains IVR-type self-service for IM
May 27th, 2009 by Dan York
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: imifiedweatherLocal Search
Find local restaurants in your area
Jabber/Gtalk: local@bot.im
AIM: findlocal
MSN: findlocal@live.comURL 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
Related posts:
- FAQ About the IMified Acquisition
- Voxeo’s IMified lets companies easily add Twitter for customer service
- Unlocking access to New York State Senate legislation info through IM, SMS, Twitter, voice via Voxeo IMified/Prophecy
- IMified Example: Have a math question? There’s a bot for that…
- REMINDER – Free webinar on how to build multi-channel apps tomorrow, Oct 7th
Tags: IM, IMified, Unfied Self-Service, Voxeo
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May 27th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Next step: Interactive Video Response!
p.s. Any chance of a Skype gateway?
May 27th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
[...] more information and to try the sample bots click here. Share and [...]
May 29th, 2009 at 10:07 am
[...] to Voxeo’s blog post regarding this acquisition IMified provides a simple, scalable web-based platform for creating and [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:58 am
[...] you may have noticed last week, we announced the acquisition of a company called IMified and with that we brought in more opportunities and options for developers. Now you can create [...]
June 15th, 2009 at 3:49 am
[...] Messaging As you will have heard, IMified has joined the Voxeo family recently. That’s great news since it expands your options in building outstanding phone [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 9:24 am
[...] The IMified platform – more on IMified here. [...]
June 29th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
[...] after we announced the acquisition of IMified, independent developer Mark Headd let us know he was excited to give it a try for some of the [...]
August 24th, 2009 at 11:26 am
[...] In the unlikely case that you may have missed it: IMified has joined the Voxeo family, giving you access to all major Instant Messaging networks. Blending neatly with the existing [...]
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:08 pm
[...] to our strong developer community. Adam was one of the co-founders of IMified and joined Voxeo as part of the IMified acquisition back in May 2009. (You can even watch Adam on [...]
February 16th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
[...] IMified, May 2009 [...]