Voxeo Talks

Continuing the series of questions coming out of our webinar, “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“, let’s ask the question:

#7 Can the cloud keep up with innovation better that what you can deliver inside your enterprise?

Communications technology doesn’t stand still. Is the cloud communication provider you are considering keeping on the leading edge (or even the bleeding edge) of technology? Or are your enterprise data centers farther ahead that the cloud provider?

More to the point, when some new technology comes along, does the cloud provider have a history of rapidly making new technology available? Or can you make that new technology available faster on your own?

In my personal opinion, the cloud should be able to keep you on the leading edge of communication tech. This is to me one of the great strengths of the “cloud”… letting you play with new technologies and services, before you deploy them within your enterprise.

I’ll give you two examples from Voxeo’s history. Back in August 2009 when we added text messaging (SMS) and instant messaging (IM) to our hosted cloud, we made it so that with a change of a button within a web interface a voice app could also become a text messaging / IM app:

Beyond changing that button and confirming the application file you wanted to use for text messaging, that was all you had to do. The cloud just brought this capability to you.

Similarly, when we added support to Tropo.com back in March 2010 to create Twitter applications, it was again with a very simple addition of a web form:

Click the link, go through the Twitter OAuth process and… ta da… your application is now responding to Twitter messages!

That’s the kind of innovation the cloud should be able to deliver to you… and is something to consider in the “cloud vs premise” debate… can the cloud connect you with new innovative forms of communication faster and more reliably than you can do yourself?

If you have been watching our @voxeo Twitter account, you may have noticed a few references to a “@tropo” account… yes, indeed, we’ve decided to give our Tropo.com cloud communications service its very own Twitter account at:

http://twitter.com/tropo

If you are a Twitter user, please do follow the Tropo account to keep up on the latest changes and advances with Tropo.com. While you are at it, you may want to check out the Tropo Blog if you haven’t done so in a while, as Adam, Jason and others have been adding lots of great tips and tutorials lately.

P.S. And if you aren’t following @voxeo on Twitter, please do! We’d love to stay in touch with you that way…

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

Lately I’ve seen a number of questions out there about “why do businesses use Twitter?” and after writing a response to someone, I decided I’d also post it here… We’ve been using Twitter for some time now for Voxeo in two ways:

1. as another way for people to “subscribe” to what we are posting to our blog site; and
2. at actual conferences/events, to relay where we are in the conference, when someone is speaking, etc.

You can see our feed – and subscribe – at http://twitter.com/voxeo

In the first case, I observed my own 1.5 years of using Twitter and noticed that I wasn’t reading RSS feeds nearly as much as I once was – but I was reading my Twitter feed all the time. So it seemed to me that for people like me we ought to offer the option to subscribe to our blog feed via Twitter. We still have RSS feeds and the ability to subscribe via email – now we just have a Twitter feed as well.

In the second case, when Voxeo has had a presence at a conference several times this past year, I have been tweeting out where some of us have been. For example, “RJ is now speaking in room D104″ or this one:

We did have someone who found me at the Voxeo booth at one of the events and said he knew I was there because I’d been twittering it out. So part of it is an experiment in seeing if we can connect with people at the various shows and events.

Now I’ve watched other corporations use Twitter for more two-way communication and while we haven’t seen that ourselves yet, I could see how it could be useful that way. Right now it’s more part of our continued experimentation with social media. Twitter and microblogging services are part of the continued evolution of the ways in which we communicate… so we figure we need to join the experiment to see how it all works.

How do you use Twitter?

Technorati Tags: voxeo, twitter