Voxeo Talks

Join us for the upcoming jam session on August 26, 2010.

Stefan Besling will introduce VoiceObjects On-Demand, a key feature of VoiceObjects 10, the new release of the VoiceObjects Application Lifecycle Suite.

Now you can combine the power of the VoiceObjects environment with Voxeo’s proven hosting infrastructure in a seamlessly integrated package.

Develop, deploy, and manage your apps more easily than ever before – and use the new nosted application analytics to monitor traffic and understand caller behavior. Learn more about VoiceObjects On-Demand and download your free developer edition at http://www.voxeo.com/vo-ondemand/.

REGISTER NOW for this session on Thursday, August 26, 2010

8:00 AM Western, 11:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European.

Looking forward to welcome you in this session.

After four great years of working at Voxeo on sales and partnerships, I am excited about a new role focusing on acquisitions for Voxeo.  We’re having fun, are growing, and are deeply interested in adding great people and more customers to the Voxeo family.  We’ve already done eight acquisitions over the last four years!  In fact,  I came to Voxeo, along with my business partners, in an acquisition when Voxeo acquired our company, VoiceReady.  And we’re all still at Voxeo today, a testament to Voxeo being a great place to work.

Teleku was the first deal in my new role.  Chris Matthieu is a great addition to the team with his coding skills and business experience. He’s sure to help us continue making the comms world simpler and easier for everyone who wants to build killer apps.   We’ve got some other deals brewing, so I intend for you to hear from me regularly.

As you may have read on GigaOm last night, Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku, we announced that Voxeo acquired Teleku, a cloud communications startup. We have a news page up summarizing the announcement, linking to a FAQ and providing other info:

blogs.voxeo.com/news/teleku/

I sat down with Teleku founder Chris Matthieu to talk about the news:

We are delighted to welcome Chris to the Voxeo family and we’re very much looking forward to what he’ll bring to Tropo and Voxeo Labs. I know he’s already hard at work with the team on some truly disruptive new services! (Stay tuned!)

Personally, I’m also excited for Chris to join us as he brings solid content creation skills in writing blog posts, creating video screencasts and recording audio podcasts. Look for his contributions to begin appearing soon (mostly over on The Tropo Blog).

Welcome, Chris, to the fun and crazy world of being a “Voxeon”!

If you are out in San Francisco this week at the Splunk .conf 2010 Worldwide Users’ Conference, you can listen to Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn on Wednesday, August 11, from 9:15-10:15am Pacific talking about “Logging at the Terabyte Scale“:

What do you do if you generate over 1 terabyte of logging data each day? How do you begin to analyze that volume of data? And how do you make it so that 100,000+ developers can easily access their own individual logging data? Learn how Voxeo uses Splunk to analyze logging data and monitor network and security operations, prove compliance, and give external developers the data they need to be successful.

As the session abstract notes, we do use Splunk rather heavily and RJ is out there to talk all about it. If you are there and want to connect, you can find RJ at the conference or contact him via Twitter.

At the SpeechTEK conference last week in New York City, I gave a talk on “Securing Communications“. The organizers had asked me to touch on the topics I covered in my recent book on Unified Communications security, so I organized the slides in that fashion:

More videos and links coming out of SpeechTEK can be found on our SpeechTEK event page. And if you have any questions about my presentation, feel free to contact me as I’m always glad to talk about security.

As several people have asked about what the video looked like that was running in the back of our SpeechTEK booth, we uploaded the video loop to YouTube.  Note that it is silent, so no, there isn’t a problem with your speakers.  Enjoy…

The video was produced by our friends over at R3M1X3D with direction on our end provided by our Kim Martin.

For those of you looking to catch up quickly on what we announced earlier this week… we issued three major announcements at SpeechTEK. If you follow these links you will see the news releases, landing pages, supporting blog posts and videos for each announcement:

• August 2, 2010 – Voxeo Announces VoiceObjects On-Demand
• August 3, 2010 – Voxeo Launches Prophecy 10 with 10X VoiceXML IVR Performance
• August 3, 2010 – Voxeo Announces The First Text Messaging Platform with a 100% Uptime Guarantee

We also are updating our SpeechTEK event page with information and links to photos, videos and more.  We’ll be adding the slides from our various presentations as well.

This week at SpeechTEK in New York, we announced the general availability of Prophecy 10 with a 10X performance improvement, an improved user interface, new analytics, support for new audio codecs and so much more.  With “P10″, we had a unique opportunity to spend an entire release cycle focused on performance and reliability improvements given that our feature set is already so far ahead of our competition.  As we said in our news release:

Prophecy 10 is the result of more than 3,000 product performance, reliability, and usability improvements and investments made by Voxeo over the last eighteen months.  While IVR platforms built with VoiceXML and CCXML standards typically support no more than 500 concurrent calls per server, Voxeo’s intense focus on product quality improvements have given Prophecy the ability to support over 6,000 concurrent calls per server – more than 10-times the performance of other standards-based IVR platforms.  At the same time, Prophecy works perfectly well on low-end netbook, notebook, or embedded computers requiring anywhere from 1 to 100 concurrent calls.

We significantly slashed the server requirements… not just hypothetically… but in very real terms. One P10 server can literally replace 10 servers running our own previous releases or any of the current releases of competitors software.  This means less hardware, less power/AC costs, less administrative overhead… and on and on.  Much lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and higher / faster Return On Investment (ROI).

Prophecy 10 is available now for free download for Windows, Linux and MacOS X at:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy10

As we hinted at in a previous post, we also brought a demo system to SpeechTEK that was running over 16,000 simultaneous IVR calls, with speech recognition included! With the P10 performance improvements, the system turned out to be rather easy to transport

I’ll be writing more about that system shortly and I’ve also recorded a video interview with Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor all about what we did. Stay tuned… it’s very cool!

Other features of Prophecy 10 include:

• Comprehensive analytics: Prophecy 10 bundles the proven capabilities of VoiceObjects Analyzer, including built-in VoiceObjects Analyzer reports for any existing VoiceXML application. Enterprises can access 30 additional reports by adding analytics notations to existing VoiceXML applications. VoiceObjects Analyzer also integrates with business intelligence (BI) solutions from SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos and Microstrategy.
• New user interface – Prophecy 10 sports a new cleaner user interface for Prophecy Commander. We spent time working on usability to give you a cleaner, faster interface that lets you get to the information you need to administer the system as fast as possible.
• Intelligent transcription support: Unlike standard VoiceXML support for limited Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Prophecy 10 uniquely includes support for intelligent speech transcription products and services from Nuance, PhoneTag, SpinVox, Yap, and Vlingo. This unique capability allows nearly any spoken dialog to be converted to text input, greatly widening the potential uses of speech-driven self-service.
• Proven call control: Prophecy supports advanced call control via both the W3C CCXML and Java SIP Servlet standards. Prophecy 10′s CCXML engine is the gold standard for XML-based call control. Prophecy’s built-in SIP Servlet engine is fully Java JSR-289 compliant and can support over 20,000 concurrent SIP sessions per server.
• Advanced enterprise and service provider multi-tenancy and virtualization: Platform resources can be logically separated, aggregated, or virtualized to partition customers or applications on a single server. Multiple servers and even multiple geographic installations can be combined to deliver extremely large multi-tenant systems. Prophecy’s multi-tenant capabilities are used to power the worlds largest and most widely-used XML telephony hosting services.
• Diverse speech recognition: Prophecy 10 includes free US English ASR and Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines and supports more than 30 additional language engines from Cepstral, IBM, Loquendo, LumenVox, Microsoft, Nuance and Telisma.
• RFC 5552: Support for SIP Interface to VoiceXML Media Services

Plus support for new audio codecs, new administrative features and so much more. We’re extremely pleased with how the release came out and we encourage you to download it today!

There are so many times when I just love the utter simplicity of our services!  I know… DUH! … you expect me to say that.  Sure. But seriously… I was speaking with a reporter at the Voxeo booth at SpeechTEK and she asked the question:

How hard is it to add SMS to an existing voice application?

To which I was delighted to be able to just say:

Let me show you!

I whipped out my laptop, logged into Evolution, and showed her the one single radio button:

Powerful simplicity!  I love it!

Want to see some of what we are doing at SpeechTEK in New York this week? Earlier today I uploaded a first set of photos to Flickr at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/voxeo/sets/72157624520939629/

There are some photos of our booth, some of the people we know who stopped by, a certain computer we’ll be writing more about… and more…

I’ll post some more photos later in the week.

P.S. For those interested in photography, some of these images were taken with my Nikon D90… others with my iPhone. Odds are that you can easily tell the difference!