Voxeo Talks

At ITEXPO back in January, Eric Linask at TMC interviewed me in what has seemed to become a regular every-six-months routine. In the interview, I discussed:

• the Cloud Communications Summit and pushing communications out into “the cloud”
• security issues related to cloud communications
• what’s next in communications, including multi-channel communications (a part of which we refer to as Unified Self-Service)

The big black vehicle behind me was being raffled off as part of the event promotion… hence why we were there. (Wouldn’t it perhaps have been more interesting if we did the interview inside the vehicle?) Anyway… here’s the video: (and will astute observers notice anything about me that is different from the other videos I’ve done?)

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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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Two weeks ago, Jason Goecke, Jose De Castro and myself (Dan York) were down in Miami Beach, Florida, to speak at ITEXPO and specifically the “Cloud Communications Summit”. Pictures I took at that event of panels we were on are now available in our Flickr stream or by clicking the image below:

P.S. Thanks to Jason Goecke for taking the pictures of my panel (with my camera), since I couldn’t have easily accomplished that feat and also been on the panel.

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Click to Play

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A few of Voxeo’s finest will be soaking up some sunshine in SOBE (SOuth BEach), Miami on January 20 – 22, 2010.  Jose de Castro Chief Architect Voxeo Labs, Director of Conversations Dan York, as well as VP of Innovation Jason Goecke will be participating at IT Expo East and the inaugural one day workshop called The Cloud Communications Show held at the Miami Beach Convention Center.  Their sessions are:

Dan York

The Cloud Communications Show: 1/20/2010

“Cloud Telephony for the Enterprise”

This session discusses tradeoffs in deploying communications applications behind the firewall, with a hosted partner or through elastic mechanisms such as Amazon’s EC2.

Other speakers planned for this session are Troy Davis, CEO of CloudVox, and Evan Cooke, Co-Founder and CTO of Twilio.  Thomas Howe will moderate the session.

Jason Goecke

The Cloud Communications Show: 1/20/2010

“Introduction to Voice Mashups: An introduction to the concept and architecture of using voice as part of modern web-based applications.”

Concrete voice mashup examples will be demonstrated, along with the business cases that support them.

Jason Goecke will be speaking, other speakers planned for this session are David Troy, Founder of Roundhouse Technologies, Jay Phillips, Founder of Adhearsion, and Joe Developer.  Thomas Howe will moderate the session.

Jose de Castro

IT Expo Conference: 1/21/2010, 2:00-2:45pm

“Value in the Clouds: The Evolution of the Telephone Industry”

With tremendous pressure on businesses and telephone companies of all sizes to generate new revenue without new capital or operational spending, hosted application opportunities are moving to the forefront of the communications arena. To fully leverage current opportunities in this fast-paced market, market participants need to first understand past and current computing models as well as the evolution of service providers beyond owning networks and selling basic voice offering. This session will discuss the evolution of the telco to more than merely a dial tone provider, the different telco models in existence today, and the new revenue potential of today’s telecom market.

Participating companies include Voxeo, Ifbyphone and CallFire.

Voxeo Corporation

If you are planning to attend IT Expo East in Miami or are in the area and would like to coordinate a meeting with Jose, Dan and/or Jason drop us a note!

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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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For any of you attending the new VON Conference & Expo from September 21-23 in South Beach, Miami, Florida, both Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn and I (Dan York) will be there at the show speaking. We now have a page up with the abstracts of the talks we’ll be giving:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/von-conference-expo-2009/

The quick view is this:

Monday, September 21, 2009

10 – 11:15am, Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX (Dan York)

11:30 – 12:30pm, The Apps Race: Building a Developer Community in the New Telecom World (RJ Auburn)

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

11 – 11:50am, Beyond Guys in Trucks: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications (RJ Auburn

This will be the very first VON show run by Virgo Publishing since they acquired the event through the demise of Pulvermedia. I personally attended and spoke a (and very much enjoyed) a number of the VON events in the past when Jeff Pulver and his team were running them – so it will be interesting to see what the event is like under different management.

In any case, if you are going to be down at VON, please drop either RJ or I an email or catch us on Twitter (zscgeek or danyork). Naturally we will be twittering on the Voxeo Twitter account from the show. See you there!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, von, conferences, danyork, rjauburn

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On Monday, August 24th, at SpeechTEK in New York, I (Dan York) gave a talk called “Securing Cloud Telephony” with the abstract:

As voice and self-service applications move increasingly into the cloud and to IP communications, what do you need to be concerned about with regard to the security of hosted solutions? If you grow to trust the cloud, how can you be sure it will be there for you? What protections can you put in place? What backup plans can you establish? What questions should you ask potential hosted/cloud vendors? In this session, security professional Dan York will walk you through the basic risk areas of voice-over-IP security, explain how those relate to both hosted and hybrid configurations and leave you with a concrete list of questions to consider in considering hosted/cloud options.

My slides are now available here:

http://www.slideshare.net/voxeo/speechtek-2009-securing-cloud-telephony-aug2009

Given that SpeechTEK records all the sessions and sells the resulting CD, I doubt that I will be able to publish a recording of the talk. Perhaps at a future time I’ll be able to give a similar talk at conference that allows open recording/distribution… or maybe I’ll just have to do a webinar some time on the topic.

Technorati Tags: speechtek, slides, dan york, security, voip, voipsecurity

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