Voxeo Talks

Over the next couple of months you’ll get a chance to hear from us and meet us at a couple of upcoming conferences.

First, from July 21-25 I’ll be up in Portland, Oregon, at O’Reilly’s OSCON 2008 giving a talk on “Mashing up Voice and the Web through Open Source and XML“. As the intro says:

With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the web let us quickly and easily access information from multiple data sources, how do we extend those mashups to the world of the phone? How do we bring the old world of voice and telephony into the new world of the web, social networks and social media? And how do we do that using open source tools and open standards?

The session description gets into a bit more about specifically what I’ll be addressing. It should be a good time! As you can see from the schedule, OSCON is a strongly developer-focused show and so it should be a great time connecting with developers out there and talking about our platform. Speaking at this show is a bit of neat experience for me personally, too, as I spoke at one of the first OSCON’s back in 2000 when it was still called the “Open Source Conference” and was held in Monterey, CA. I know a good number of folks in the O’Reilly orbit so I’m looking forward to connecting with lots of people out there.

Next up, both RJ and I will be speaking at SpeechTEK, August 18-20 in New York City. In fact, we’ll have a team of Voxeons there as we’ll have an exhibit booth and all sorts of things going on at the show. (More on that in later posts.)

RJ will be speaking first on Monday, August 18th, along with VoiceXML Forum founder Ken Rehor on the subject of “The Impact of W3C standard languages“:

The publication of W3C standard languages, such as VoiceXML and CCXML, has dramatically changed the speech application design process. This session discusses some of the efforts to extend and validate the use of standard languages. Learn how the call control language can work with SIP and VoIP to implement an extensible SIP softswitch. Discover how the VoiceXML Forum’s certification program has impacted the cross-vendor interoperability of VoiceXML by VoiceXML platform vendors.

Given our huge focus on open standards and RJ’s direct involvement as chair of the W3C’s CCXML Working Group, you can expect this session to deliver a wealth of information! (Hmmm… how high can I set the expectation bar for RJ? Hmmm… “he’s going to show how open standards solve world hunger!”… no, that’s a bit too high! RJ is, though, an excellent presenter as you may get a glimpse of from his past slide decks.)

I’ll follow with a session on Tuesday, August 19th, called “Securing CCXML and VoiceXML Applications“:

How secure are your speech applications? As the usage of both VoiceXML and CCXML continues to explode, and VoIP usage continues to grow dramatically, especially within enterprise environments, it is increasingly important that you ensure that applications and services are not open to attack. Learn about the potential vulnerabilities in a system using VoiceXML or CCXML, what you can do to secure these systems, and how you can develop a strong architecture.

Given my VoIP security background, it’s somewhat predictable that I’d be talking on this subject, eh? Seriously, though, it’s an area that doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of thought and so I’ll be taking a look at what the real risks are and how you can look at addressing them.

If you are going to either OSCON or SpeechTEK, please do leave a comment here or drop us an email and let us know. We love to meet face-to-face with blog readers and/or customers/developers. As much as we are able to do so (not sure yet), we’ll make the presentations available through this site. Stay tuned for more info - and we look forward to potentially seeing some of you in either Portland or New York!

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, conferences, rj auburn, dan york, oscon, oreilly, oscon2008, speechtek, speechtek2008, voicexml, security, voip security, ccxml, mashups, xml

Would you like to learn what’s involved with “creating Communication 2.0 applications?” Now courtesy of the great folks at IT Conversations you can listen to Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn give his eComm 2008 presentation on just this topic. Over in our Voxeo Developers Corner blog, we previously linked to RJ’s slide set and provided the source code for his CCXML -> Twitter example, but now you can listen to the talk as well. Here’s the description of his talk, which runs about 15 minutes:

Developing applications for telephony and communication is very difficult. There are old, proprietary systems to integrate with, standards are rare, and when there are standards, they are implemented differently and can’t be integrated out of the box. Telephone networks are also closed and restricted by NDAs. Compared to web development, telephony development is a hassle.

RJ Auburn of Voxeo describes how his company’s telephony development stack is the infrastructure that will unlock the creativity of application developers. Using voice XML and CC-XML, developers can interact with telephone services similar to using a web service. This spares them from having to know the gory details of the telephone network. He compares it to the difference between writing standard web pages and having to write an Apache plug-in for each site.

He concludes by showing a sample application that will make a phone call each time a tweet is received from Twitter. This only takes a couple minutes when using the developer tools from Voxeo.

We hope you enjoy RJ’s presentation and if you want to try your hand at creating “Communications 2.0 Applications”, be sure to check out either our free hosted platform or on-premise platform - both available at www.voxeo.com/free We look forward to seeing what great applications you create!

Technorati Tags:
applications, voxeo, rjauburn, ecomm, ecomm2008, conferences, presentations, ccxml, twitter, mashups, voice, telephony

Have you ever wanted to quickly launch a call to a group of friends or colleagues? Say you want to get together for dinner (or a party) and rather than keep going around on IM or email you just want to talk to them all quickly? Or perhaps you are working with a project team scattered all over and as the deadline approaches you want to rapidly get all the team members together on a conference call?

As we are announcing today, a new Facebook application called “Party Line” does exactly that. Built by the folks at Equals, this application lets you create an unlimited number of “party lines”, each of which can have up to five members in it. You can either initiate the call from directly inside of Facebook or you can call 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME (1 877 428 9963) and simply select the number of the party line that you want to launch. The application then calls out to all members of the Party Line and… ta da… you are there in the conference call. Talk as long as you want… it’s free. No conference bridge numbers. No passcodes. Simple. Easy.

Want to try it out? All you need to do is (assuming you already have a Facebook account) go to:

www.equals.com/partyline

That address will automagically redirect you to the Facebook application page where you can simply add the application to your Facebook profile.

Once you have done that, you should be brought to the application page where you have one more step to do before you can get started. Click on the Advanced tab and you will see a place to get enter the phone number you want to use to make/receive calls (typically your mobile phone). Enter your number and press Verify. In a rather cool form of verification, the application will then call you and give you a code to enter into the verification box that pops up.

Now you can go back to the Party Line tab and just start creating party lines and adding in your Facebook friends. If they don’t have the application installed yet, they’ll be prompted to do so when you invite them.

Initiating a “Party Line” call can be easily done in either of two ways:

1. Call 1 877 4 BUZZ ME (1 877 428 9963). For one of the party lines you have created, you simply enter the number after a prompt and the call connects. For a party line created by someone else of which you are a member, you press “#” first and then the number of the party line. In both cases you can listen to the list of available party lines so you don’t have to remember the numbers.

2. Use the Facebook application interface. If you are logged into Facebook, you can just hit the big “equals” button to “Buzz Now! and start the call, as show here:
   

That’s it. After a brief sponsor message you are placed into the conference call with the other members of the party line and can talk for as long - or as little - as you want to.

Would you like to see it in action? Here’s a quick video tour:

We are rather thrilled to see this use of our platform by the folks at Equals. As far as we know, this is the first time a customer has built a Facebook app that uses our application platform, so we’re delighted to see it become available.

More than that, it’s a wonderful example of how someone can build a Facebook app based on the open standards of CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. In particular, Call Control XML (CCXML) is being used to control all the call processing - and the conferencing. When someone calls in, CCXML is driving the overall call flow… initiating the calls to the other users and then bringing them into a shared conference. In turn, SIP is being used for all the connectivity out to the PSTN through our various service providers and VoiceXML is used for the the spoken dialogs you hear in the application. All around a pretty cool use of open standards in the midst of a Facebook application.

We’re also excited because while this application launched initially on Facebook, the Equals folks have built it in such a way that they will be able to move it to OpenSocial and from there allow it to be used on all the many other social networks that will support OpenSocial apps on their systems. They also have a range of other ideas to expand this application that we are looking forward to seeing as they roll those out.

Congrats to the team at Equals on this launch and we look forward to seeing what they do next. If you are on Facebook, please do check out the Party Line app and let us know what you think. (There is also documentation available if you would like more information about the application.) And if you want to learn more about how you could develop on our platform using open standards like I mentioned above, please check out our free developer accounts and software and learn how you can get started today.

Technorati Tags:
applications, facebook, facebook applications, facebook platform, voxeo, equals, social networking, voip, voice, voice applications, voice mashups, sip, prophecy, ccxml, xml, voicexml, ivr, opensocial, party line, conferencing, collaboration

Want to call somewhere and find out where your nearest Ethanol or biodiesel fuel stations are? Thinking about trying out biodiesel but you want to know how feasible it is to get fuel in your area? Well, just in time for Earth Day 2008 tomorrow, a member of our developer community, Mark Headd, has brought out “Project Green Phone” - a very cool voice mashup that integrates Voxeo Prophecy and StrikeIron web services… all through the use of the PHP, ECMAScript (JavaScript), VoiceXML and CCXML. Mark writes about the goals of his project:

• To make use of the Voxeo Prophecy platform, the premiere VoiceXML/CCXML platform for building voice applications (at least in my opinion).

• To code the application entirely in VoiceXML, CCXML, ECMAScript and PHP (that’s right, no database!).
• To integrate with SOAP-based web services to obtain data on E85 and Bi-Diesel station locations, and to do other cool stuff like send an SMS message from VoiceXML.
• To make use of interesting and unique audio files for prompts and to signal specific types of outcomes.
  

All in all it’s a very cool demonstration of integrating our application platform with web services using web programming languages. Mark’s blog has all the info, detailed instructions and code - you are free to download it and try it out yourself. While he focused on finding fuel stations near you, you can obviously modify his code to make use of other web services to obtain other information. (Do note that, like other mashups using phone numbers for location, it may not always work if the number you call in on is from a mobile phone, VoIP service or is in a different region via local number portability.)

Mark indicates he’ll be following this with more posts in the future and we’re looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with! Meanwhile, I’m going to install his app on my local Prophecy box and see where the nearest biodiesel station is to me…

[Standard disclaimer applies here… Voxeo Corp. has no connection to this code and can’t vouch for how it works - we just thought it was a cool use of our platform that we should point out… use at your own risk… if you run out of biodiesel on your way to the station, it’s not our fault… yadda, yadda, yadda… ]

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, voxeo prophecy, prophecy, mashups, voice mashups, voice, geolocation, earth day, environment, strikeiron, biodiesel, ethanol, applications, voicexml, ccxml,php

One of the challenges we have in giving away voice application development services is that for the most part we don’t really know what exactly people do with our platform! If they become a commercial hosted customer, we obviously learn about their application but if it’s done with our premise Prophecy platform, or even a free account on our Evolution portal, we don’t usually know what people are using us for unless they (or someone) tell us or it turns up in one of our searches.

So we were intrigued to learn via a blog post back in March that a developer has launched the “Turnout Machine” using Ruby on Rails and our platform. The blog post has more details, but here’s the piece on the application screen:

• Dare your friends to vote and see if they chicken out.
• We’ll send your friends a txt or give them a phone call on election day reminding them of their promise to vote.

The developer indicates that this is his experiment in looking at “how peer-to-peer connections might be leveraged to create action”. He goes on to talk about the technical side:

The application was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a Joyent Accelerator. The interesting bits from a technical perspective are the txt messaging and telephony support. To send out txt messages I am using Clickatell - an SMS aggregator and service provider. I had never interfaced with their service before, but it turns out there is a gem for Ruby that made it insanely simple. To send out phone calls I had considered using Asterisk, but instead decided on using Voxeo’s hosted VoiceXML platform. This made it easy to get the service up and running quickly without having to think very much about telephony infrastructure. It will also let me do speech recognition if the need ever arises.

It’s great to see he’s using Ruby on Rails to interact with our platform and personally being very interested in all things political I do wish him all the best with his experiment. I do hope he’ll write up how it all worked out for him. (Of course, it sounds like our part (calling people with reminders) doesn’t kick in until the actual Election Day this coming November.) Again, the blog post has more details if you would like to learn more.

Do you have a cool application you have developed using our platform (hosted or premise)? If so, please do drop me a note and let me know. We’re looking to profile more applications here on this blog in the future.

P.S. We don’t know the developer of this application and as the blog post was unsigned we can only guess his name from the About page. If you do choose to actually participate in his Turnout Machine application, it is at your own risk. We just thought it was worth writing about as a cool use of our platform.

Technorati Tags:
ruby, rubyonrails, voxeo, voicexml, applications, politics

Do you remember the 1992 movie “Sneakers”? At one point the main characters are trying to get into a place, but first need to get through a voice verification system.  So they create a recording: “My name is Werner Brandis. My voice is my password. Verify me.” Voila! Since this is Hollywood, access is granted. A real-world, modern-day version of this type of technology is now available on the Voxeo Prophecy IVR Hosting platform - only unlike the movie, it can’t easily be spoofed!

Earlier this week, we announced the delivery of VoiceVerified’s voice authentication services on our platform.  Using their “Unforgettable Password(TM)” technology, the solution provides consumers with a more convenient and secure way to obtain sensitive information or perform transactions over the phone. Callers no longer need to remember PINs and passwords or divulge personal information such as their social security number or mother’s maiden name. Instead consumers can authenticate using their unique voice print.  And, unlike the voice verification system in “Sneakers”, VoiceVerified’s system asks the caller to authenticate by repeating a randomly generated series of numbers, eliminating the kind of “replay attack” that helped the heroes of Sneakers.  

We think it’s a great solution and we’re pleased to be working with VoiceVerified.  We’ve also published a case study that highlights some of the reasons why VoiceVerified selected Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Hosting services.  You can check out VoiceVerified’s web site for more information about their products and services or contact them via email to learn about using their services with our platform.

What do you think? Do you see a role for voice verification services with your applications?

Today over on his Tech News Comments blog, Markus Göbel writes about how he uses an application on our Evolution site as a bridge from Skype to the phone network. People who call him on his Skype ID ring him on his desk phone or cell phone. It’s a great little demonstration of our transfer capabilities.

Markus also wonders what I think about this solution, especially given that I had written about Skype’s lack of interoperability on my Disruptive Telephony blog earlier this year. Well, first off, I’m delighted that Markus is experimenting with our platform and we do appreciate his kind words and writing about his experience. We’re glad to see he liked our Designer tool. We’ve put a lot of work into making that an easy and simple way to create voice applications without requiring you to learn all the intricacies of VoiceXML.

Second, he’s right that I’ve known about the “Skype-to-phone” capabilities of our platform and in fact I’ve used it for some of my own applications that I’ve developed on our platform. I just haven’t written about it on any of my blogs for two reasons:

1. The inbound Skype connection is there to allow our developers to build interesting applications for Skype; and
2. The connection is only one-way and doesn’t provide the full interoperability that I was writing about.

Let me hit each of these points separately. First, one of the coolest things to me about developing voice apps on our Evolution hosted platform is how incredibly easy it is have an app that can be reached from a range of different sources. As shown in the diagram to the right, any application you create can be reached through the following methods:

• Direct dial across the PSTN to a direct phone number (and applications can be assigned more than one number - for instance if you wanted numbers in different area codes)

• Dialing across the PSTN to an 800-number with a PIN code.
• Dialing across the PSTN to a non-800-number with a PIN code (which I didn’t show in the diagram)
• Inbound connections from SIP endpoints
• Inbound connections from Skype users
• Inbound connections from FWD (formerly FreeWorldDiallup)

Any of you reading this can try it out - just follow our Quick Start Guide. Skype is one of the ways that you can connect to whatever kind of application you create. As an example, here are the contact numbers for a small application of mine (a call-in comment line for my Blue Box podcast):

Pretty cool stuff, eh? Of the many things you can do with your application, you can of course make outbound transfers to the following services:

• Regular PSTN phone numbers (note that free Evolution developer accounts are restricted to making calls within the USA)

• SIP endpoints (including FWD users)

Note that outbound dialing is not enabled by default but if you email our support team we will issue you a “token” that you can use for outbound calling from your app.

What Markus did was create a very simple app that did an outbound transfer over SIP to a service which then rang his various phones. (As he is in Germany, the free Evolution accounts could presumably not call his number directly. Paid Evolution accounts, can, of course, call anywhere and pay the corresponding rates.) Calls can come in via Skype (or other means) and go out via SIP.

So if this is a “Skype-to-SIP” gateway, why aren’t we trumpeting it to the world? Simple… that’s not the purpose of the Skype connection. The inbound connection from Skype is to allow the 30,000+ developers on Evolution to build interesting apps that can work with Skype. Sure, you can obviously create a simple Skype to SIP “transfer” application like Markus did, but that’s not why Skype created the connection with us and if all we used it for was Skype-to-SIP transfers probably at some point Skype might clamp down on the usage. So while it certainly can be done, we ask people to understand the real reason we have the connection and to please not abuse that.

The second reason I personally haven’t written about this capability is because it’s not a full Skype interoperability solution. If you look on the right side of the diagram above, what’s missing? We can accept inbound connections from Skype (which is admittedly very cool for our apps), but we can’t do outbound connections to Skype users. If you look back at my article about Skype interop what I want is the ability to make SIP connections from within the Skype client itself. In contrast to Markus, who is now delighted that he can turn off his Skype client yet still receive calls to his ID, I want to use the Skype client and be able to call SIP endpoints.

In any event, I’m delighted that Markus is trying out our platform. He concludes his piece with:

Let’s see which other solutions I can develop with Voxeo. Their visual tool makes the design of VoiceXML fairly easy.

I, too, look forward to seeing what other solutions he’ll develop!

Technorati Tags:
skype, sip, voxeo, applications, xml, voicexml, fwd

Do you do Linux software development? Want to be the point person on an exciting Linux/MacOS project? If so, we’re looking for you! As we say in our job posting for a “Senior Linux Systems Engineer“:

Voxeo is looking for a seasoned Linux Systems Engineer with exceptional C/C++ development skills to spearhead Voxeo’s Linux and Mac OS X development projects. This is an exciting opportunity to get in on the ground floor of efforts to bring our Prophecy SIP Platform to enterprise Linux and Mac OS X.

As you may be aware, our award-winning Prophecy software today runs only on Microsoft Windows. We’ve heard very clearly from our customers that they would also like to have it run on Linux and, since we all use Mac laptops, we’d sure like it to run on Mac OS X as well. We’ve started the work to port the code, but now we’re looking to bring someone in very specifically to spearhead this effort. We’ve got a great engineering team and this project will be a great one to be a part of. Because this role will involve heavy interaction with the rest of our engineering team, the position will be based in our Orlando, Florida, headquarters. (where, as they remind me, it’s nice and warm right now!)

If you are interested in applying for this position, please apply through CareerBuilder.com (i.e. please don’t leave replies here on the blog).

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, linux, macosx, jobs, voip, voice, applications

We’re very pleased to note that we’ve signed on as a sponsor of BarCampOrlando coming up on April 5th and 6th, 2008. In keeping with the BarCamp spirit, this event is one in which people are strongly encouraged to participate with some kind of brief presentation about a topic that interest them. This is the second BarCampOrlando, though, and it’s grown to encompass two days!

• Dev Day, Saturday, April 5th - Programming, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, robots and other technologies
• Media Day, Sunday, April 6th - Social media, video, music, photography, graphic design, blogging, podcasting, and other new media

Being huge supporters of the Orlando, Florida, area, we’re delighted to help promote activities like this that help connect people working with technology in our area. We hope that many of you reading this will come check out the event if you are in the Orlando area on April 5th and 6th.

For more information about what BarCampOrlando is all about, there is a video available from the organizers along with a
less serious video on the same subject.

Registration is now open so please do sign up and come on by! (The event is free to attend, but registration is required to ensure there are enough seats.)

Technorati Tags:
barcamp, barcamporlando, voxeo

Following last week’s speaking engagements at Voice Search and eComm 2008, a few Voxeo team members remain on the west coast this week for Spring VON.x and Digium Asterisk World. The conferences, which kicked off today, are collocated at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA. Voxeo’s CTO, RJ Auburn, is part of a panel discussion titled, “The Impact of Next Generation Web Technology on Open Source Telephony Applications”. The discussion will take place Wednesday, March 19th from 3:15pm – 4:30pm in Room A7 for anyone who will be at the show. Voxeo is also exhibiting at the VON Expo with longtime partner, CommuniGate Systems. CommuniGate Pro’s SIP proxies are deployed in Voxeo’s worldwide hosting facilities. We’ll be in booth 725, so stop by and talk to Jose or RJ if you are attending the show.