Voxeo Talks

Have you checked out the Party Line application for Facebook that I wrote about a few weeks back?

Well, the folks at Equals have spent some time working on the application and listening to the feedback from users. They’ve made some changes to it and also clarified some of the usage terms. Here are the major changes:

• Removed the initial advertisement that people being called out had to listen to when they were put into a call. Callers now just get dropped immediately into the conference bridge so that you can start talking! Note that the person initiating the call still hears a brief ad while the service is connecting the other members of the call.

• Clarified in their FAQ that calls are at least for the initial rollout limited to a maximum of 15 minutes.

The team there at Equals is continuing to look at ways to improve the application and are definitely looking for feedback as well. If you haven’t checked it out, we encourage you to read our previous post and then simply get started using the Party Line application inside of Facebook.

We’d also note that Equals CEO Ajay Madhok recently gave an interview to The Social Times which has now been released as a podcast if you would like to know more about the company and what they are doing.

We’re pleased to see an application using our platform to bring voice inside of Facebook - and we look forward to seeing what they come up with next!

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Would you like to learn what’s involved with “creating Communication 2.0 applications?” Now courtesy of the great folks at IT Conversations you can listen to Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn give his eComm 2008 presentation on just this topic. Over in our Voxeo Developers Corner blog, we previously linked to RJ’s slide set and provided the source code for his CCXML -> Twitter example, but now you can listen to the talk as well. Here’s the description of his talk, which runs about 15 minutes:

Developing applications for telephony and communication is very difficult. There are old, proprietary systems to integrate with, standards are rare, and when there are standards, they are implemented differently and can’t be integrated out of the box. Telephone networks are also closed and restricted by NDAs. Compared to web development, telephony development is a hassle.

RJ Auburn of Voxeo describes how his company’s telephony development stack is the infrastructure that will unlock the creativity of application developers. Using voice XML and CC-XML, developers can interact with telephone services similar to using a web service. This spares them from having to know the gory details of the telephone network. He compares it to the difference between writing standard web pages and having to write an Apache plug-in for each site.

He concludes by showing a sample application that will make a phone call each time a tweet is received from Twitter. This only takes a couple minutes when using the developer tools from Voxeo.

We hope you enjoy RJ’s presentation and if you want to try your hand at creating “Communications 2.0 Applications”, be sure to check out either our free hosted platform or on-premise platform - both available at www.voxeo.com/free We look forward to seeing what great applications you create!

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Have you ever wanted to quickly launch a call to a group of friends or colleagues? Say you want to get together for dinner (or a party) and rather than keep going around on IM or email you just want to talk to them all quickly? Or perhaps you are working with a project team scattered all over and as the deadline approaches you want to rapidly get all the team members together on a conference call?

As we are announcing today, a new Facebook application called “Party Line” does exactly that. Built by the folks at Equals, this application lets you create an unlimited number of “party lines”, each of which can have up to five members in it. You can either initiate the call from directly inside of Facebook or you can call 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME (1 877 428 9963) and simply select the number of the party line that you want to launch. The application then calls out to all members of the Party Line and… ta da… you are there in the conference call. Talk as long as you want… it’s free. No conference bridge numbers. No passcodes. Simple. Easy.

Want to try it out? All you need to do is (assuming you already have a Facebook account) go to:

www.equals.com/partyline

That address will automagically redirect you to the Facebook application page where you can simply add the application to your Facebook profile.

Once you have done that, you should be brought to the application page where you have one more step to do before you can get started. Click on the Advanced tab and you will see a place to get enter the phone number you want to use to make/receive calls (typically your mobile phone). Enter your number and press Verify. In a rather cool form of verification, the application will then call you and give you a code to enter into the verification box that pops up.

Now you can go back to the Party Line tab and just start creating party lines and adding in your Facebook friends. If they don’t have the application installed yet, they’ll be prompted to do so when you invite them.

Initiating a “Party Line” call can be easily done in either of two ways:

1. Call 1 877 4 BUZZ ME (1 877 428 9963). For one of the party lines you have created, you simply enter the number after a prompt and the call connects. For a party line created by someone else of which you are a member, you press “#” first and then the number of the party line. In both cases you can listen to the list of available party lines so you don’t have to remember the numbers.

2. Use the Facebook application interface. If you are logged into Facebook, you can just hit the big “equals” button to “Buzz Now! and start the call, as show here:
   

That’s it. After a brief sponsor message you are placed into the conference call with the other members of the party line and can talk for as long - or as little - as you want to.

Would you like to see it in action? Here’s a quick video tour:

We are rather thrilled to see this use of our platform by the folks at Equals. As far as we know, this is the first time a customer has built a Facebook app that uses our application platform, so we’re delighted to see it become available.

More than that, it’s a wonderful example of how someone can build a Facebook app based on the open standards of CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. In particular, Call Control XML (CCXML) is being used to control all the call processing - and the conferencing. When someone calls in, CCXML is driving the overall call flow… initiating the calls to the other users and then bringing them into a shared conference. In turn, SIP is being used for all the connectivity out to the PSTN through our various service providers and VoiceXML is used for the the spoken dialogs you hear in the application. All around a pretty cool use of open standards in the midst of a Facebook application.

We’re also excited because while this application launched initially on Facebook, the Equals folks have built it in such a way that they will be able to move it to OpenSocial and from there allow it to be used on all the many other social networks that will support OpenSocial apps on their systems. They also have a range of other ideas to expand this application that we are looking forward to seeing as they roll those out.

Congrats to the team at Equals on this launch and we look forward to seeing what they do next. If you are on Facebook, please do check out the Party Line app and let us know what you think. (There is also documentation available if you would like more information about the application.) And if you want to learn more about how you could develop on our platform using open standards like I mentioned above, please check out our free developer accounts and software and learn how you can get started today.

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Want to call somewhere and find out where your nearest Ethanol or biodiesel fuel stations are? Thinking about trying out biodiesel but you want to know how feasible it is to get fuel in your area? Well, just in time for Earth Day 2008 tomorrow, a member of our developer community, Mark Headd, has brought out “Project Green Phone” - a very cool voice mashup that integrates Voxeo Prophecy and StrikeIron web services… all through the use of the PHP, ECMAScript (JavaScript), VoiceXML and CCXML. Mark writes about the goals of his project:

• To make use of the Voxeo Prophecy platform, the premiere VoiceXML/CCXML platform for building voice applications (at least in my opinion).

• To code the application entirely in VoiceXML, CCXML, ECMAScript and PHP (that’s right, no database!).
• To integrate with SOAP-based web services to obtain data on E85 and Bi-Diesel station locations, and to do other cool stuff like send an SMS message from VoiceXML.
• To make use of interesting and unique audio files for prompts and to signal specific types of outcomes.
  

All in all it’s a very cool demonstration of integrating our application platform with web services using web programming languages. Mark’s blog has all the info, detailed instructions and code - you are free to download it and try it out yourself. While he focused on finding fuel stations near you, you can obviously modify his code to make use of other web services to obtain other information. (Do note that, like other mashups using phone numbers for location, it may not always work if the number you call in on is from a mobile phone, VoIP service or is in a different region via local number portability.)

Mark indicates he’ll be following this with more posts in the future and we’re looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with! Meanwhile, I’m going to install his app on my local Prophecy box and see where the nearest biodiesel station is to me…

[Standard disclaimer applies here… Voxeo Corp. has no connection to this code and can’t vouch for how it works - we just thought it was a cool use of our platform that we should point out… use at your own risk… if you run out of biodiesel on your way to the station, it’s not our fault… yadda, yadda, yadda… ]

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One of the challenges we have in giving away voice application development services is that for the most part we don’t really know what exactly people do with our platform! If they become a commercial hosted customer, we obviously learn about their application but if it’s done with our premise Prophecy platform, or even a free account on our Evolution portal, we don’t usually know what people are using us for unless they (or someone) tell us or it turns up in one of our searches.

So we were intrigued to learn via a blog post back in March that a developer has launched the “Turnout Machine” using Ruby on Rails and our platform. The blog post has more details, but here’s the piece on the application screen:

• Dare your friends to vote and see if they chicken out.
• We’ll send your friends a txt or give them a phone call on election day reminding them of their promise to vote.

The developer indicates that this is his experiment in looking at “how peer-to-peer connections might be leveraged to create action”. He goes on to talk about the technical side:

The application was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a Joyent Accelerator. The interesting bits from a technical perspective are the txt messaging and telephony support. To send out txt messages I am using Clickatell - an SMS aggregator and service provider. I had never interfaced with their service before, but it turns out there is a gem for Ruby that made it insanely simple. To send out phone calls I had considered using Asterisk, but instead decided on using Voxeo’s hosted VoiceXML platform. This made it easy to get the service up and running quickly without having to think very much about telephony infrastructure. It will also let me do speech recognition if the need ever arises.

It’s great to see he’s using Ruby on Rails to interact with our platform and personally being very interested in all things political I do wish him all the best with his experiment. I do hope he’ll write up how it all worked out for him. (Of course, it sounds like our part (calling people with reminders) doesn’t kick in until the actual Election Day this coming November.) Again, the blog post has more details if you would like to learn more.

Do you have a cool application you have developed using our platform (hosted or premise)? If so, please do drop me a note and let me know. We’re looking to profile more applications here on this blog in the future.

P.S. We don’t know the developer of this application and as the blog post was unsigned we can only guess his name from the About page. If you do choose to actually participate in his Turnout Machine application, it is at your own risk. We just thought it was worth writing about as a cool use of our platform.

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