Voxeo Talks

Ever wished there was a simple way to do automated testing of your IVR or other voice application? Without a complex setup and without costing a great amount?

Back at SpeechTEK in August, our partners at Nu Echo announced the availability of their “Nu Bot Platform” for IVR Application Testing. Today, Andreas Volmer from our Cologne office published a review of Nu Bot and how it can interact with VoiceObjects over on the VoiceObjects Developer Blog:

NuBot – Automated end-to-end testing of IVR applications

Andreas provides some great screenshots and other information about how to use Nu Bot with VoiceObjects. He also points out that Nu Echo is still accepting participants for its Nu Bot Beta program, so you, too, can apply to try out the platform. I liked Andreas’ ending:

I can only recommend to get your hands on it and try it; it’s about time that we take automated testing more seriously in the IVR application business.

Indeed! Good to see Nu Echo getting this Nu Bot solution out there and I’d love to hear what others think of it.

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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.

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Would you like to add SMS and IM interaction to your existing VoiceXML apps? Would you like access to new reports and analytics in Prophecy? This morning here at SpeechTEK 2009 in New York City, we announced Prophecy 10, the latest release of our Prophecy product, which includes all this and more. P10 is a huge release for us in our continued delivery of what we call “Unified Self-Service”, the ability to develop an application once and have users interact with that application via voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, and more. Prophecy 10 includes:

• SMS and IM Integration – Building on our IMified integration, Prophecy 10 allows you to take your existing voice applications and enable them to work with SMS or IM. When you login to our Evolution developer portal and look at the settings for an application, you will see that you can now add SMS and IM to any given application. This same capability has now been added to our Tropo.com cloud service as well.
• Comprehensive analytics – Utilizing the power of VoiceObjects Analyzer we have added 15 analytics reports directly into Prophecy 10, with the ability to access the full range of VoiceObjects Analyzer reports through simply adding the additional software module.
• Dramatic performance improvements – Every third release of Prophecy we take a moment to see what we can do to make it even faster and more powerful than it was before. We’ve done that in spades with P10, delivering the capability to run 100 ports of XML telephony on a very low-end netbook, up to 500 ports on a standard Windows or Linux server and up to 2,000 ports on a single high-end 64-bit server.

The news release goes into the full details and if you are here at SpeechTEK, you can stop by our booth #800 where you can see our demo of 20 Acer netbooks running Prophecy 10 in a 2,000 port cluster. It’s VERY cool stuff…. (and we’re giving away 10 of the netbooks as well!)

The early access release of Prophecy 10 is immediately available for download now for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Users of our hosted Evolution Developer Portal or Tropo.com will also see that they can start adding IM and SMS to existing applications right away.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, speechtek, sms, im, tropo

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While Voxeo holds regular technical Jam Sessions for our VoiceObjects developer community, this month we’re really jamming with a special-edition session on the business advantages of personalization. With personalization, self-service applications can automatically adapt to individual preferences and recent transactions for an improved customer experience, lower costs and untapped revenue opportunities.

Industry veteran and VoiceObjects founder, Michael Codini, will talk about how you can:

• Delight callers with personalization
• Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs
• Learn from customer behavior
• Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, recent transactions and more
• Deliver targeted offers
• Leverage investments in business intelligence

The online Jam Session will take place on Tuesday, June 16^th at 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 AM PST, 5:00 PM CEST.  You can register here.

Click here to learn more about our regular, monthly technical Jam Sessions.

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If any of you are at Genesys’ G-Force conference this week in Orlando, Florida, please do stop by the “Partner Pavilion” exhibit area and check out what our VoiceObjects team is there to demonstrate.

Given that we (Voxeo) compete rather directly with Genesys on an application platform level, you might wonder why we are there at their conference (and in fact are a sponsor as VoiceObjects).

The reality is that while our VoiceObjects service creation environment works wonderfully with our own Prophecy platform, it also works great with over 40 other IVR platforms, including Genesys’.

In fact, the beautiful part about using VoiceObjects as a development tool is that you are able to develop your applications completely separately from the IVR platform that actually executes your applications. Develop on VO and then deploy on Voxeo Prophecy, Genesys, Cisco, Intervoice, HP, Avaya, Nortel or other platforms.

Your development tool does not lock you into your deployment platform!

We see this as a great strength compared to so many of the other application development tools out there that wind up only working with usually a single application platform. Why limit yourself?

So we do have customers using VoiceObjects with the Genesys platform and in that light we are over at the G-Force conference this week talking with partners and customers about the power of VoiceObjects as a development tool. If you are there at the show, please do stop by the Partner Pavilion and say hello.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, genesys, g-force, conferences

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FYI, the folks over at Speech Technology Magazine have published a new supplement on “The Importance of Testing, Tuning and Tools“. Voxeo is one of the sponsors of that supplement and we encourage you to check out our article about our tools.

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Technorati Tags: speechtechmag, speech, speechtech, speech technology, voxeo, tools, voiceobjects

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If you visited the VoiceObjects home page today, you may have noticed a new change.[1] Yes, indeed, our talented web team introduced some new changes including the spiffy logo seen over on the right.

We’re quite pleased with how the logo came out and look forward to introducing it throughout the VoiceObjects site and materials. Watch for more changes, too, coming across all of our sites. We’ve got some great things in the queue…

[1] And if you haven’t visited the VO page lately, why not check it out?

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects

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Okay, I admit, given that in my life I’ve bought a good amount of furniture from IKEA, it was rather fun to learn that IKEA Germany has launched a new self-service phone/voice portal using our VoiceObjects software. As the VoiceObjects news release states:

Swedish furniture retailer IKEA recently launched a new self-service phone portal designed, developed, and integrated by Excelsis utilizing the Voxeo VoiceObjects phone application server and development tools. The new phone portal provides IKEA customers with innovative self service options, including information about the in-stock availability of more than 10,000 articles, a store locator, information on delivery costs and payment details, and SMS notification services.

IKEA’s primary goal in deploying a new phone portal was to assure a high level of customer satisfaction. IKEA focused on automating common yet simple customer requests. More complex or unique customer requests are transferred quickly to IKEA service agents after the phone portal collects basic account information. This information is passed automatically to the customer service agent. In combination, IKEA’s focus on automating basic calls and quickly transferring other calls significantly reduces customer hold time and improves customer satisfaction. Finally, the new voice portal needed to provide a flexible and future-proof platform, allowing IKEA to quickly respond to ever-changing market needs while maintaining high call quality.

So if you are in Germany, you now can call in to this service and find out if IKEA products are available, where stores are and more. More information can be found in the news release.

Now if only there were an IKEA store closer to where I live now… I need to buy some new glasses to go with the ones we bought there 5 or 6 years ago…

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Technorati Tags: applications, voiceobjects, voicexml, voxeo, ikea, voice

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VoiceObjects Developer Edition 7.4 is available for download now.

Exciting new features of this release include:

• Support for 2-way SMS dialogs

  VoiceObjects 7.4 has expanded the text channel so that in addition to USSD dialogs text messaging from mobile devices using the Short Message Service (SMS) is now supported. The architecture follows a flexible, extensible adapter approach to be able to support arbitrary SMS gateways. Using the new functionality organizations can extend their automated self-service offerings to additional channels, providing users of mobile phones and messaging clients a powerful and efficient interface. Moreover, new customer groups may be entered by providing a means of interaction that is unmatchable low in cost.

• Security enhancements
  Two new user roles as well as several new capabilities related to password handling have been added to VoiceObjects user management to support deployments in security-sensitive areas.

• Newly supported Media Platforms
  Support has also been added in VoiceObjects 7.4 for the media platforms Nortel ICP and Voxeo Prophecy 9.0.
• New expression functions

  A significant number of new expression functions has been added to enable more convenient manipulation of strings and dates. There is also a new function to easily apply configuration settings in a bulk operation. Visit our blog to learn how the new functions can be used: Exploring the new Expression Functions in VoiceObjects 7.4 and Handling Test Case Data in VoiceObjects 7.4

You can download VoiceObjects Developer Edition 7.4 from
http://developers.voiceobjects.com/downloads/

To learn more about VoiceObjects 7.4 join our Developer Jam Session on January 14th.

Join us to stay up-to-date with the newest release.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, voice, applications, voice applications, developers, development

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So we’re pregnant, eh? At least, according to industry analyst Nancy Jamison…

I have to admit that of all the great coverage we’ve been reading over the past few days about Voxeo’s acquisition of VoiceObjects, the one post that definitely made me laugh the most was Nancy’s. I mean, when she titles her post “Voxeo Unified Communications Pregnancy Confirmed – no Due Date Announced” and starts her announcement coverage with this:

However, today, Voxeo announced a further acquisition, that when you dig down into it only confirms that Voxeo is heavily pregnant with a UC child, but just won’t admit the due date yet.

… well, it’s hard for me not to chuckle!

Thanks, Nancy, for the kind words… and yes, between our own Prophecy product, the SIP-based presence/IM products of Micromethod and now the development tools and multi-channel support of VoiceObjects, we have indeed assembled a wonderful communications toolkit… and more is on the way…

Stay tuned…

P.S. If you’d like to throw a baby shower for us, I’m sure we can come up with a wish list…

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, unified communications

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