Voxeo Talks

Over at eComm Europe in Amsterdam yesterday, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn did his characteristic stirring of the pot with a talk called The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice. The Twittersphere seemed to be quite amused by the CTO of a “voice” company saying this – an oft-twittered phrase was:

Voxeo is talking about text, not voice! Kids don’t talk on the phone, they text or IM. So the future is text.

To people reading this blog or any of our other blogs, these statements shouldn’t come as any real surprise. Today the way companies interact with customers definitely includes voice – and for ten years now we’ve helped over 100,000 developers, over 45,000 companies and over half the Fortune 100 deliver exceptional customer service over voice.

But any look at communications trends today – including our own usage as individuals – will show that we’re increasingly moving to a world in which voice is only one of the many channels that customers use to interact with you – and it may not be the preferred channel. It’s not just the fact that “Kids don’t talk on the phone” – it’s also that we as consumers/individuals don’t want to wait on the phone while a call center agent takes forever to look something up on a slow computer system. We want to multi-task… we want to get other things done. But yet sometimes we also want to just get a person on the phone.

From a Voxeo perspective, we call this “Unified Self-Service™” – the idea of developing one application and allowing customers to interact with that application through whatever communication channel they choose: voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, mobile web … whatever.

We’re not just talking about this, of course… we’ve made it real today… with our Prophecy 10 platform, with our IMified platform, with our VoiceObjects product… you can sign up for a free account in our Evolution developer portal and write a VoiceXML app that interacts with users via voice (from the PSTN, SIP or Skype), via SMS or via IM. Today. Now. It’s that simple. Or go over to Tropo.com and write your multi-channel app in JavaScript, Ruby, python, PHP or Groovy. One application – many channels.

You’ll obviously see us writing and speaking more about this topic in the weeks and months ahead. But rather than listen to us – dive in and try it out!

And in the meantime, check out RJ’s slides – they are done in RJ’s typical excellent style (and yes, he presented the 94 slides in under 15 minutes):

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As he did back at eComm in San Francisco in March, photographer James Duncan Davidson (“Duncan”) has been at it again this week in Amsterdam at eComm Europe with this outstanding set of photos from eComm:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/x180/sets/72157622680355908/show/

Here is the Flickr set as a slide show:

Voxeo’s RJ Auburn and Jay Phillips can be seen here:

RJ: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
Jay: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5

Scattered throughout that photo set, of course, are so many other friends of Voxeo… it’s great to see!

By the way, how does Duncan get such great shots? Obviously a lot of it has to do with his skills as a photographer, but it is also about quantity. In a Google Wave where this topic was discussed, Duncan indicated that on the first day of eComm Europe he shot around 1500 images and posted 109 – for a post rate of around 7%.

Kudos to Duncan, too, for letting presenters use them for their own blogs, promotions, etc. Great of him to do so.

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Are you a developer working with voice or communications applications in the San Francisco Bay area? Or will you be in SF next week for VoiceCon or Enterprise 2.0? Interested in learning more about “voice mashups”, cloud-based voice, “recombinant telephony” and other innovations?

We (Voxeo) are joining with Orange Labs for a special edition of Orange Spotlight focused on the coming “wave” of mashups involving cloud-based voice technology, innovations in messaging, and realtime web. On Wednesday evening, November 4th, we will be hosting a collection of developers and strategists working at the edge of the current art in hosted contact center, IVR, speech, and multimodal technologies who are all gathered for the purpose of sharing knowledge and inspiration. Some of the participants include:

• Thomas Howe of voice mashup fame
• Voxeo – Dan York and Jason Goecke
• Rebelvox – Tom Katis
• Ditech Networks – Jamie Siminoff
• LiveOps – Tony Simek

and many more. If you are a subject matter expert or have an active interest in the future of telephony, this will be an evening of interactive discussion on this exciting area. The event is from 5:30 – 8:00pm at Orange Labs’ facility in South San Francisco near the SFO airport.

Space is limited so please email me (Dan York) ASAP if you are interested.

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Next week is a bit of a marathon speaking schedule for me (Dan York) out in San Francisco. VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0 are co-located at the Moscone Center in downtown SF and I’m actually speaking at both events. Full details of my talks can be found on our event pages at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/voicecon-san-francisco/
http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/enterprise-2-0/

The overall schedule looks like this:

Monday, Nov 2 (VoiceCon)

3:15 – 4:15 pm – Presence – Current Progress and Future Trends

Tuesday, Nov 3 (Enterprise 2.0)

11:15 am–12:00 pm – Case Studies In Enterprise Micro-Blogging

4:15 – 5:00 pm – The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise

Wednesday, Nov 4 (VoiceCon)

3:15 – 4:15 pm – Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA

Thursday, Nov 5 (VoiceCon)

8:00 – 9:45 am – Web 2.0 and Enterprise Communications – Fad or the Future?

I’m very much looking forward to both events, both to participating in the sessions I’m in and also to seeing all the other great sessions at both events.

In the Presence session on Monday, moderator Don Van Doren will be getting the panel involved in a discussion around what we need for truly making presence be more useful in an enterprise environment. (As to my involvement there, do recall that Voxeo has a product, SIPoint, which provides a SIP-based presence server among other services.)

On Tuesday, the first session on microblogging should be a good tour inside different ideas of taking Twitter-like microblogging inside the company, something I wrote about at some length in the past. The second session is a reprise of the “reactor” panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston earlier this year – only with different panelists. Should be a fun and interactive session.

Wednesday brings a session on voice mashups where I will be demonstrating what can be done with our Tropo.com platform and then a gentleman from IBM will be demonstrating mashups on their platform. And finally Thursday wraps up my participation with a almost two-hour “deep dive” into the role of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise with my frequent co-presenter Irwin Lazar.

All in all it should be a great event. (And add in speaking at an event on Wednesday night (more on that in another post) and… well… I think I’ll be tired by the time Friday rolls around! )

If you are going to be out at either VoiceCon or Enterprise 2.0, please feel free to say hello or drop me a note in advance. You can also expect that I’ll be tweeting throughout the time at both my own @danyork account as well as the @voxeo Twitter account.

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Ever had that moment when you really wanted to know the square root of a number? Or maybe the sine or cosine of an angle? (Believe it or not, I recently did when building something out of wood.) Or maybe you wanted to quickly convert a decimal number to hex? or vice versa? Or maybe you just wanted a quick random number?

Well, now all of that and much, much more is right at your fingertips through IM by way of “Math bot” created by Vinay Raikar:

http://wg.vinayraikar.com/apps/math/

You simply add “math@bot.im” as a contact to your Jabber or GoogleTalk IM account and start asking away. Vinay Raikar suggests this example:

sin(deg2rad(1.2))-tan(30)-exp(1.1)*2/pow(7,1.1)-fact(2)

although I personally went more for examples like:

rand()
dechex(24)
fact(12)

and of course the VERY useful:

help

Which lists all the commands available as well as constants that you can use in your expressions.

All in all a rather fun and creative use of our IMified platform. Kudos to Vinay Raikar for creating this bot.

If you’d like to try your hand at creating applications like this, please head over to IMified.com where you can sign up for a free developer account, read the API docs and get started right away.

If you have created an interesting IMified application and are open to having it publicized here, please email me and I’ll take a look.

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If you are in Europe and interested in emerging communications technologies, I really hope you are planning to attend eComm Europe next week in Amsterdam. The eComm schedule is truly an amazing collection of some of the greatest thinkers about “what comes next?” in terms of communications. It really looks to be an outstanding event.

(NOTE: You still can register and if you enter the promotional code “Voxeo” you will get 20% off the price of your ticket.)

Two of those speakers will be from Voxeo. As noted on our event page:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/ecomm-europe/

on Thursday, October 29, 2009, from 11 – 11:15, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn will be speaking about “The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice“:

Voice applications are dying. The era of the voice-only IVR is over. Take one look at the younger generation now entering the work force and consumer space – how many of them actually use their phones to place calls? Or take a look at the incredible success companies are having with “live web chat” to provide customer support? The cold, hard reality is that customers want more choice in how they interact with your company – and increasingly they want to choose non-voice communication means. They want to contact you via SMS, IM, Twitter, Facebook or the mobile web. They don’t want to work through a mountain of menus – they want to send you quick short requests and get back answers fast. How do you cope with this change in behavior? How can you develop applications that interact with customers in all these different channels? In this talk, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn will outline the rise in real-time text communication and offer suggestions for how you can efficiently create applications that let you scale your support for multi-channel communication and deliver the information customers need in the channels they want. Come prepared to ask questions and learn how to move beyond voice.

Thirty minutes later, from 11:45 – 12:00 pm, Jay Phillips of Voxeo Labs (and Adhearsion fame) will speak on “Entrepreneurial Advantages with New Open-Source Technologies”

As an industry how do we build scalable voice applications with open-source tools? How do we infuse talented web developers into the “uncool” telephony world? Why hasn’t open-source completely dominated telephony like it has in other tech industries? These are some of the biggest questions facing the future of Emerging Communications and their answers are changing dramatically every year. Brewing at Voxeo Labs is an open-source approach to building arbitrarily sophisticated communications applications which promises to shake up the industry. In this session Jay Phillips, the new VP of R&D at Voxeo and creator of the open-source Adhearsion telephony framework, will discuss the exciting new ways developers and entrepreneurs will be able to easily build, productize, and scale telephony applications. As an open process, willing community members are also invited to help build this public asset and make their lasting marks in a profound way on the world.

Please do check out their talks and feel free to introduce yourself. As a Platinum Sponsor, Voxeo will also have a booth in the exhibit area – please do stop by to say hello to Sabine Winterkamp and other Voxeons who will be around.

Once the show is over we’ll be posting RJ and Jay’s presentations to our SlideShare account and will have links to them here. We’ll also have tweets going out from the show on either our @voxeo and/or our @voxeogermany Twitter accounts.

We look forward to meeting up with some of you there at eComm!

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Recently some of the team in Voxeo’s Beijing office took a trip to the Beijing Botanical Garden and uploaded a set of photos for all to see:

I’ve not yet traveled to Beijing myself, but based on these photos the Botanical Garden looks like a great place to visit when I do get there! (Thanks to Michael Zhang in our Beijing office for sharing them with us.)

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Ever wished there was a simple way to do automated testing of your IVR or other voice application? Without a complex setup and without costing a great amount?

Back at SpeechTEK in August, our partners at Nu Echo announced the availability of their “Nu Bot Platform” for IVR Application Testing. Today, Andreas Volmer from our Cologne office published a review of Nu Bot and how it can interact with VoiceObjects over on the VoiceObjects Developer Blog:

NuBot – Automated end-to-end testing of IVR applications

Andreas provides some great screenshots and other information about how to use Nu Bot with VoiceObjects. He also points out that Nu Echo is still accepting participants for its Nu Bot Beta program, so you, too, can apply to try out the platform. I liked Andreas’ ending:

I can only recommend to get your hands on it and try it; it’s about time that we take automated testing more seriously in the IVR application business.

Indeed! Good to see Nu Echo getting this Nu Bot solution out there and I’d love to hear what others think of it.

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Today out in Glendale, Arizona, Jason Goecke, Voxeo’s VP of Innovation for Voxeo Labs, will be speaking at the AstriCon 2009 event. As outlined on our events page for Astricon 2009, Jason’s talk is today at 10:00am:

Wednesday, October 14, 2009
10 – 10:35, Devloping AGI & AMI Applications with Ruby and Adhearsion

Adhearsion (http://adhearsion.com) is a Ruby-based framework, installable as a gem, that provides a comprehensive development environment for developing voice enabled applications using a jargon free DSL. Further, Adhearsion integrates with Rails in various ways, extending Rails seamlessly into the voice world.

We will provide an overview of why Adhearsion was created, how it works and then provide a tutorial on developing your first application.

If you are there at Astricon, please do say hello to Jason, who can also be found on Twitter as @jsgoecke.

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It´s been more than 6 months since our partner Nu Echo released NuGram IDE Basic Edition, a free Eclipse-based grammar development environment, and almost two months since we announced its integration into Voxeo´s VoiceObjects service creation environment. For this reason, Nu Echo is currently conducting a survey to get feedback from the grammar developer community. Whatever your experience has been with NuGram so far, they want to hear from you. Help them make NuGram an even better product.

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