Voxeo Talks

Why has voice verification historically been so difficult to implement? In an age of identity theft, when companies are looking for additional ways to secure online transactions, why shouldn’t they be able to use voice? In a time when companies are looking for ways to deliver services to customers faster, why shouldn’t they be able to use voice as a way to secure the delivery of those services?

Whether people call it “voice verification”, “voice authentication” or “voice biometrics”, the common question people ask is “Why does using voice for security have to be so hard?”

It doesn’t.

Today we are pleased to announce a new voice biometrics initiative with four of the leading voice biometrics companies where you can add voice biometrics to a new or existing VoiceXML application TODAY. Through the power of the cloud, your application running on our Prophecy Hosting service can securely communicate with the hosted services of CSIdentity, PerSay, TradeHarbor or Vocalect.

If you go to our new biometrics portal page at:

www.voxeo.com/biometrics

you will find links to “How To” documents from each of the four vendors explaining how you can easily integrate their service into a new or existing VoiceXML application. All of the vendors are also making trial accounts available for interested developers. Try one vendor out… try them all out.

The point is that voice biometrics is very real… today… and you can implement security based on voice today on Voxeo’s platform.

Use voice biometrics as a way to securely automate password resets on your corporate LAN… use it as a way to secure an e-commerce transaction… use it as a way to confirm access to confidential information about an order being processed… use it as a way to secure access to your corporate IVR… use it to secure callers into a private conference call… use it for whatever wacky idea your imagination can come up with…

Use it… play with it… the code is out there! If you already have an account on our Evolution developer portal, you can modify an existing VoiceXML application or create a new one. If you don’t have an account, signing up is free and lets you get started right away creating voice applications, complete with inbound phone numbers, Skype numbers and SIP interconnection, as well as outbound dialing, speech recognition, conferencing and much, much, more…

And when you are ready to make your application go live in a production environment, simply contact us and we can get your app running on the industry’s largest VoiceXML hosting cloud and the only one backed by a 100% uptime service level agreement.

Try it out… voice verification is no longer something “too hard” to do… it’s simple and it’s here today!

Please visit our voice biometrics announcement page to watch video interviews with each of the four partners, to read guest blog posts and to find other information about using voice biometrics on Voxeo’s platform.

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Last minute shopping trips, family gatherings, and out-of-town visitors. All contribute to the holiday rush that puts drivers in a less-than-cheery mood. This season avoid traffic backups and other problem areas with 511.

511 is the nationally designated abbreviated dialing code for real-time travel information. Callers can get instant updates on road construction, traffic, weather conditions, and more. It’s a free service that’s currently available to more than 70% of the U.S. population. 511 leverages interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition to provide drivers with anytime, “hands-free” access to information. If you find yourself in a jam this holiday season or want an update before hitting the road, give 511 a call. 

Voxeo partner, PBS&J, delivers Voxeo-powered 511 systems in Virginia and North Carolina. PBS&J provides reliable 511 IVR services – even during the holidays when traffic and weather conditions trigger huge fluctuations in call volume. The Voxeo-powered solution ensures PBS&J clients have high availability, on-demand scalability, and cost-effective bursting during usage spikes. Learn more about 511, PBS&J, and Voxeo in our new case study.

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Interested in learning about the advantages of hosted speech solutions versus on-premise solutions? Or why you should or shouldn’t have to choose? Want to understand the pros and cons of pushing voice applications out “into the cloud”? If so, please join us today at 2pm US Eastern time for a free webinar hosted by Speech Tech Magazine and including speakers from Voxeo, Angel.com, Contact Solutions and Nuance Communications. To sign up, please go to this URL:

http://www.speechtechmag.com/webinars/roundtable/12nov2009/vox2

Industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum (formerly Datamonitor and author of Datamonitor’s IVR short list report) will start the session with a market overview and the whole event is hosted by Speech Tech Magazine’s David Myron. Key questions to be discussed include:

• How the incentives built into a hosted agreement impact the customer’s long-term results;
• How the arrangement should be set up for you to realize maximum savings;
• The capabilities to look for when selecting a provider;
• The role of monitoring, reporting, and tuning;
• The role of caller behavior analysis;
• The impact of service-level agreements on performance, availability, and caller experience;
• The limitations when handling different interaction types, such as touch-tone, mobile, speech, and authentication/verification; and
• Integration with customer and third-party data/solutions to meet unique call requirements.

It should be an interesting collection of viewpoints given the mix of vendors. Again, it’s free, so please feel free to sign up and join us at 2pm US Eastern, 11am US Pacific. The session will also be archived for later viewing.

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At VoiceCon SF 2009 last week in San Francisco, I (Dan York) spoke about “Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA“. In the talk, I discussed what voice “mashups” are, gave a couple of examples, and then went on to show one of the Tropo.com examples found on the documentation page – the specific one I showed was the Yahoo!Weather example in python. I logged into my Tropo.com account, created a new application, indicated that I wanted to use a hosted file, copied/pasted text from the example, and then set up a phone number and IM address.

You can do all this, too, since Tropo.com accounts are free.

Here are the slides I used in my voice mashups talk:

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Last week at eComm Europe, Voxeo Lab’s Jay Phillips spoke on “Entrepreneurial Advantages with New Open-Source Technologies” and as usual providing an entertaining set of slides complete with LOLCats and other pictures that… well… make you think you kind of had to be there to understand! Along the way he outlined the state of a number of different open source telephony and communication tools… and made an announcement in the middle, too….

You can see Jay’s slides on SlideShare or here:

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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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