Voxeo Talks

Join us for this session, scheduled for July 22, 2010.

In this developer jam session, Tobias Goebel will show you how to use VoiceObjects (Voxeo’s service creation, execution and reporting environment) as the front-end and IMified (Voxeo’s hosted texting platform) as the back-end to deliver self-service over SMS with unmatched ease of development and time to market.

Topic: Providing Self-Service Through SMS Applications

Date: July 22, 2010

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

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Over at eComm Europe in Amsterdam yesterday, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn did his characteristic stirring of the pot with a talk called The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice. The Twittersphere seemed to be quite amused by the CTO of a “voice” company saying this – an oft-twittered phrase was:

Voxeo is talking about text, not voice! Kids don’t talk on the phone, they text or IM. So the future is text.

To people reading this blog or any of our other blogs, these statements shouldn’t come as any real surprise. Today the way companies interact with customers definitely includes voice – and for ten years now we’ve helped over 100,000 developers, over 45,000 companies and over half the Fortune 100 deliver exceptional customer service over voice.

But any look at communications trends today – including our own usage as individuals – will show that we’re increasingly moving to a world in which voice is only one of the many channels that customers use to interact with you – and it may not be the preferred channel. It’s not just the fact that “Kids don’t talk on the phone” – it’s also that we as consumers/individuals don’t want to wait on the phone while a call center agent takes forever to look something up on a slow computer system. We want to multi-task… we want to get other things done. But yet sometimes we also want to just get a person on the phone.

From a Voxeo perspective, we call this “Unified Self-Service™” – the idea of developing one application and allowing customers to interact with that application through whatever communication channel they choose: voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, mobile web … whatever.

We’re not just talking about this, of course… we’ve made it real today… with our Prophecy 10 platform, with our IMified platform, with our VoiceObjects product… you can sign up for a free account in our Evolution developer portal and write a VoiceXML app that interacts with users via voice (from the PSTN, SIP or Skype), via SMS or via IM. Today. Now. It’s that simple. Or go over to Tropo.com and write your multi-channel app in JavaScript, Ruby, python, PHP or Groovy. One application – many channels.

You’ll obviously see us writing and speaking more about this topic in the weeks and months ahead. But rather than listen to us – dive in and try it out!

And in the meantime, check out RJ’s slides – they are done in RJ’s typical excellent style (and yes, he presented the 94 slides in under 15 minutes):

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.

Just a reminder that tomorrow at 8am US Pacific, 11am US Eastern, 5pm Central European time, our next Developer Jam Session will focus on how you can build “multi-channel” applications where customers can interact with those apps via voice, IM, SMS, web, Twitter and more…

Would you like to build “multi-channel” communications apps where customers can interact with your app via voice, IM, SMS, web and Twitter? Would you like to take existing voice applications you have developed and add these new channels to that app? Does the idea of writing an application once and having it interact with all these different communication channels intrigue you? Are you seeing requests from customers to interact with you in ways other than voice?

If so, please join our free Developer Jam Session webinar on this coming Wednesday, October 7th, 2009:

Topic: IMify your voice application! Exploring new ways of customer interaction with Voxeo VoiceObjects and IMified

Date: Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Time: 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 5pm CEST

Speakers:
Dave Hoff, Senior Engineer, Voxeo
Tobias Goebel, Sr. Presales Consultant, Voxeo Germany

Abstract: With the acquisition of IMified and VoiceObjects, Voxeo has demonstrated its clear commitment to be the number 1 provider of Unified Self-Service™: the idea that one and the same service definition can drive dialogs in any modality available to end customers, be it voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM, Web, or even social networks.

This jam session introduces IMified, Voxeo’s hosted platform for Instant Messaging bots, and explains how VoiceObjects can be utilized to build dialogs that extend the scope of customer interaction to Instant Messaging networks such as Yahoo, Skype, AOL, MSN, or Google Talk, but also other text-based channels such as SMS or Twitter. Learn how to IMify your existing VoiceObjects application with minimal developer effort but maximum customer impact.

If you can’t attend on Wednesday, the session will be archived on our Monthly Jam Sessions web page for later viewing.

We were very pleased to see this great write-up in the blog of the New York State Senate Office of the CIO, “Dialing in to the NYSenate OpenLeg API“, that outlines the great work that independent developer Mark Headd has done.

As the article notes, Mark has used our IMified platform to let people find out the status of legislation before the NY State Senate using:

• Instant Messaging Client (Jabber): opensenate@bot.im
• Twitter Client: Send a tweet formatted as a @reply to @opensenate
• Short Message Service (SMS): Send a text message to (315) 308-1943
• Regular Telephone: Call (646) 736-2439 (see note below)

Through whichever channel people want to use, they can now query the NY State Senate legislation database and find out the status of various bills. As the NY State Senate blog post author, Nathan Freitas, stated:

These services fit very well with the Office of the CIO’s vision for a fully mobile-accessible legislative body, where everyone from elected officials to their consituents can fluidly connect with eachother around issues that matter to them no matter where they are. Access of information via mobile phones also signficantly leverages the playing field when it comes to cost… a $99 iPhone is a pretty fantastic computing device.

Mark went into more details on his own blog in a post, “Leveraging the Government 2.0 Platform“, specifically noting that the exposure of an open API by the NY State Senate was the exciting part to him:

When governments make their data available in public formats, and expose APIs for querying such data, they are throwing the door open to outside developers to build useful things. That’s significant, and the NY Senate should get some major props for being among the first (if not the first) legislative body in the country to provide an API for their legislative information.

When governments make data available through an API, they are telling developers: “Use any platform or programming language you want to access our data.” The basic requirements for invoking an API like the NY Senate’s (or the District of Columbia’s 311 API) is the ability to communicate via HTTP and to parse XML, or JSON. Since pretty much every modern programming language and development platform can do these things, it creates opportunities for developers of all stripes.

But if APIs are platform and language agnostic, they are also modality agnostic – if the data exposed through an API is compact enough, there are lots of different ways to present this data to an end user.

Mark also notes that his application actually uses two of Voxeo’s platforms. The IM, SMS and Twitter interfaces come through IMified and the voice comes through our hosted Prophecy platform (via our Evolution developer portal). As we announced recently, SMS and IM integration are now available directly to Evolution users and now creating multi-modal / multichannel applications just got that much easier!

Kudos to the NY State Senate Office of the CIO for providing their open API and to Mark Headd for the great work he did making that API accessible to people through voice, IM, SMS and Twitter.

Great to see!

Today we are very pleased to announce that our IMified platform now lets you build applications that interact directly with Twitter. In fact, if you’ve already built an application (or “IM bot”) that interacts with the leading IM networks, adding Twitter support is this easy:

1. Register a Twitter name with Twitter
2. Add the Twitter name to your bot configuration (and go through the Twitter OAuth process)
3. Start receiving and generating messages to and from Twitter

That’s it.

Everytime someone sends a “@” message or a direct message (DM) to your Twitter account, the contents of that tweet will be sent to your application. Your app can reply back with more information, or really do anything else with that data.

Why might you want to do this? As we said in the news release:

As the volume of a company’s Twitter messages grows, an application on the IMified platform can scan incoming tweets and reply back as appropriate based on information in the message, speeding up the response time and allowing company staff to focus on more detailed inquiries. As another example, companies using Twitter as a customer service channel can create an application that will respond to Twitter inquiries late at night when customer service staff are not available. Similarly an application could scan messages and alert staff via IM or other channels when certain Twitter users contact the company or certain keywords appear in tweets.

“Think of all the typical information you gather at the beginning of a customer service interaction like the user’s name, account details, or a description of the problem they are having,” York continued. “Unlike phone-based IVR where a user has to work through menus, Twitter and other short-message communication services enable automated agents to supplement human support without putting a menu barrier in front of people. Automated agents can watch both public and private/direct Twitter messages and either respond with the appropriate information or make sure the appropriate person responds to the message.”

The IMified platform also supports outbound notification via Twitter and can be linked to other business processes and systems. A library, for example, can receive a query from a user about a certain book. When the book becomes available, the application can send the user a Twitter direct message with this information. In a similar fashion, a company can create a loyalty program that alerts users when specific sales or events occur. In both cases, the application can send automated messages from the same Twitter account used by company staff so that replies can be seen and handled by staff.

We’ve seen an increasing interest by companies in adding Twitter as yet another customer service / customer interaction channel. We want to help them expand and scale their Twitter usage.

For us it is all part of our broader “Unified Self-Service” vision where you can write an application once and have that application interact with customers in whatever medium they choose to contact you. I’ve drawn it this way:

That’s the vision we’ve been building for some time now… and we’re delighted to announce the addition of one part of the social messaging part of that picture today. Now… we’re excited to see what you all will do with it!

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, imified, twitter, microblogging, customerservice, enterprise, e2conf