FAQ about Voxeo’s acquisition of Motorola’s VoiceXML browser business (VoxGateway)
October 6th, 2009 by Dan YorkToday we are pleased to announce that Voxeo has acquired Motorola’s VoiceXML browser business, including full and exclusive rights to Motorola’s VoxGateway VoiceXML browser. Additionally, all existing OEM customers of Motorola’s VoiceXML browser are now Voxeo customers. As we’ve been talking about this announcement, we came up with the following answers to questions we’re being asked. If you have additional questions, please feel free to email me.
What is a “VoiceXML browser”?
A VoiceXML browser is the software you connect to when you call into a voice application. It is the interface between you as the caller and the automated application you are calling. If you think of a web browser on your computer, the interaction looks like this:
The web browser requests files from a web server and then presents them to you visually in the web browser window. A VoiceXML browser looks quite similar:
The main difference is obviously that the information retrieved is presented back to you as audio over your phone instead of visually on your computer screen. Here is a picture that shows the interaction in our hosted platform for an inbound call:
The voice browser is the software interacting with the caller.
What is special about Motorola’s VoiceXML browser?
Motorola had one of the very first commercial deployments of a VoiceXML browser back 10 years ago when VoiceXML first came out. The product, called “VoxGateway”, is one of the most widely used VoiceXML browsers with many companies licensing it. It is extremely modular and flexible for companies seeking to integrate it into existing products and is extremely standards-compliant. Some of the largest voicemail deployments in the world are built on VoxGateway.
What is the relationship between Motorola and Voxeo?
Voxeo was an early licensee of the VoxGateway software back in 2002. Once we had the source code, we began to build additional modules on top of the VoxGateway base. For instance, we added a module that used MRCP to interact with other speech engines and added a SIP module that let our Prophecy VoiceXML browser interact with VoIP systems. Today our Prophecy VoiceXML browser is an advanced… really supercharged VoiceXML browser built on the basic VoxGateway foundation.
In 2004, Voxeo entered into a partnership with Motorola where Voxeo took on responsibility for development of the basic VoxGateway product. Motorola still sold, licensed and supported the product, but Voxeo provided the development. Separately, Voxeo continued development of our advanced Prophecy VoiceXML browser. Along the way, we went to great lengths to ensure that Prophecy was the most VoiceXML-compliant browser on the market, passing all of the standard and optional VoiceXML compliance tests.
Today, we are announcing that Voxeo has acquired the complete VoxGateway business from Motorola, including all source code. We’ve licensed the software back to Motorola for their usage. The agreement also includes cross-licensing of related Voxeo and Motorola patents.
What does this mean for Motorola’s OEM customers?
Voxeo will be fully supporting all of the Motorola customers who have OEM’d the Motorola VXML browser. We will be continuing to maintain and develop the VoxGateway browser. The win for those OEM customers is that they can, if they choose, license the advanced modules we developed directly from Voxeo to get the added functionality.
What does this mean for Voxeo’s existing customers?
No immediate change, given that they are already using our advanced Prophecy VoiceXML browser. However, this strengthens our technology platform and gives us more options for the future.
Will Voxeo now be licensing the VoiceXML browser to other companies?
Definitely. For many years Voxeo has been licensing its technology to many of the other vendors in the industry. Our CCXML browser is the most widely licensed CCXML engine in the industry and is deployed in the networks of many of the vendors offering CCXML. Our speech engines (ASR and TTS) have been licensed out to other companies. In fact, our Evolution developer portal has been licensed and rebranded by companies seeking their own developer portal.
Now, with the full source code, we can license out to customers not only the basic VoxGateway browser but our full advanced Prophecy VoiceXML browser. As companies are increasingly looking to add VoiceXML functionality to existing products and services, we can now help them add VoiceXML without having to develop it all themselves.
Will Voxeo be enhancing the VoiceXML browser now that it owns it?
Certainly. The W3C is working on VoiceXML 3 now (and Voxeo’s Dan Burnett is actually co-chair of that effort), so you can expect to see us add that support as the standard matures. We have a lot of other ideas, too, so stay tuned…
Related posts:
- Voxeo announces acquisition of Micromethod bringing new SIP capabilities to our platform
- The Voxeo acquisition of VoiceObjects – a summary post
- FAQ About the IMified Acquisition
- Unlocking Communications with Voxeo’s Prophecy 10
- Our upcoming talks at SpeechTEK and OSCON 2008 – VoiceXML, mashups and security
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October 6th, 2009 at 2:08 am
FAQ about Voxeo’s acquisition of Motorola’s VoiceXML browser business (VoxGateway) http://bit.ly/j4JHX
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October 6th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
FAQ about Voxeo’s acquisition of Motorola’s VoiceXML browser business (VoxGateway) http://bit.ly/j4JHX (via @voxeo)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter