Voxeo Talks

Today at 11am US Eastern time I’ll be interviewing the folks from VoiceVerified.com on the “Squawk Box” daily podcast about voice biometrics/voice verification in general and about their specific solution. Here’s a bit of a video preview:

Given my VoIP security background, this topic is obviously quite intriguing and fascinating to me and I’m looking forward to learning more about VoiceVerified. As we wrote about previously, VoiceVerified actually uses our (Voxeo) Prophecy IVR Hosting Services as part of their infrastructure so I also have an additional interest in learning more.

If you’d like to join today’s call at 11am US Eastern time and listen in or ask questions, you can do so either through the Facebook Calliflower application or directly through Calliflower.com. The podcast will also be available for listening later on Alec Saunders’ blog at www.saunderslog.com. (I’ll post a link here on this blog as well.)

P.S. “Squawk Box” is a daily podcast on technical topics of the day hosted and produced by Alec Saunders and appearing on his Saunderslog blog. I often participate in the calls and as Alec is on vacation this month, he asked me to fill in as a host for him this week. Other than my frequent involvement as one of the many participants, there is no formal connection at all between Voxeo and the Squawk Box podcast.

Technorati Tags: voiceverified, squawk box, voice biometrics, voice verification, security, voip security

Have you been using our Evolution developer portal and wished you could more easily search the log files generated by your voice applications? Would you like to be able to generate reports and charts based on data in your log files?

Now you can. For some time now we’ve been working on a solution in our labs and now we’d like to get your feedback on a new service we’re calling “Prophecy Log Search“! We’re still developing the service but it’s far enough along that we thought we’d release it as a beta and, as noted below, ask for your feedback.

With your Evolution account, you have always had access to the “Application Debugger” which provides a powerful way to view log entries generated by applications in real-time. As the calls come in, you can watch the messages generated by your apps and see any issues that may come up as the calls occur. You have also had access to your log files through the “Files, Logs and Reports” menu inside of Evolution. Here you could download log files from your application sessions and view them on your own system.

Today, with “Prophecy Log Search“, we’re giving you a whole new way to search. You now have full online access to all the log files generated by your applications and can search those log files for any search terms - all through the click of a mouse. You can save queries to be able to easily return to them. You can very easily refine your search by just clicking on terms in the search results. You can export your search results to text or CSV files. And, of course, you can generate charts and images like the ones I’ve shown below:

A COUPLE OF CAVEATS

Given that the service is still in development, there are a couple of points we should mention:

• Prophecy Log Search works best right now in Firefox. We have seen occasional issues with usage in Internet Explorer or Safari.

• Prophecy Log Search is only available for developer applications. While we are continuing to test the service, it is currently not available for production applications.
• We’re continuing to develop the service. The hamsters we employ to dig through the log files may sometimes escape their cages and we have to herd them all back in.

GETTING STARTED

To get started, here’s all you need to do:

1. Login to your Evolution account. On the initial Account page click on “Prophecy Log Search (beta)“.

2. View our introductory videos. Because the service is so powerful, we’ve created a few screencasts to demonstrate the basic functionality. If you take a few minutes to watch them, I think you’ll be able to get far more out of the Log Search service.

3. Start using the service. If you have had calls to your applications within the last 24 hours, you’ll see that data as soon as you enter the Log Search interface. If you haven’t had calls in the last 24 hours, you’ll need to change the time interval and run some of the searches. Also you’ll note that you will see more information captured by our system for VoiceXML applications than for CCXML or CallXML applications. We’re working on that.

4. Provide feedback in the Prophecy Log Search forum. We want to hear from you! What do you like about the service? What don’t you like? What features would you like to see added? What errors or issues have you found? We’ve created a special Prophecy Log Search Support Forum that we’ll be monitoring and we’d encourage you to leave your feedback there. (Even if you just want to tell us you like it!)

We’re pleased to be able to bring out this new service and would definitely love to hear your feedback. We are still developing the service further and so your comments and opinions will help guide the direction of the service. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, prophecy, logging, search, voicexml, ccxml, callxml, voice applications, voip, voice, applications

Can you trust the cloud computing platform to be there when you need it? Is the platform reliable enough to always be available? If you are going to move your applications off of your own servers and “into the cloud”, can you trust that your customers will be able to get to those applications?

In light of Google App Engine’s downtime yesterday, people are asking that question again. TechCrunch’s article provided this cute little graphic on the right and said “Stuff like this tends to make developers nervous about adopting a new platform.”

Downtime definitely does raise concerns, but let’s put yesterday’s Google App Engine outage in perspective - Google has been very clear that GAE is a preview release for developers to test applications. Nowhere have they said that you should run production apps on the GAE platform. Not yet anyway. It’s a place for developers to experiment - as I did with use GAE to store VoiceXML applications. Google has since explained the issue they found and at the moment everything seems to be fixed. That’s the reason they are running the beta test that they are… get a large number of people on the platform and see what issues are to be found. By the time they get Google App Engine out into production, you’ll have to think they’ll have sorted many of these issues out. But for right now GAE is definitely “beta”.

Now, when you look at cloud computing platforms to run your production applications, you do need to be asking questions like:

• What kind of availability guarantees / Service Level Agreements (SLAs) does the platform vendor provide? Are there actual guarantees or is it simply “best effort”?
• What kind of geographic redundancy is built into the underlying network? If there’s a natural disaster in one region will it wipe out all access to your applications?
• What kind of network redundancy is built into the underlying network? Is the “cloud” all ultimately running on a single carrier’s connections to the Internet? (Bad idea?) Are there multiple carriers servicing each geographic location?
• What kind of physical redundancy is built into the data centers? In the end you need electrical power, air conditioning and physical security to ensure that the actual servers upon which your apps are running continue to run. What is the “cloud” platform built on?
• What kind of monitoring does the vendor perform? Is there a 24×7x365 Network Operations Center (NOC) that is monitoring the health of the network and all applications?
• What kind of scalability is in the cloud computing platform? Can it grow as your application grows? Can it handle extreme spikes of traffic?
• What kind of security, both network and physical, is part of the computing platform? What steps does the vendor take to ensure the network is protected from attackers?
• Finally, what will the vendor do if there is downtime? How quickly will you be contacted? How quickly will the vendor respond? Will the downtime be reflected in your bill?

Here at Voxeo we’re obviously huge believers in moving voice applications into the “cloud”. We’ve been helping customers do that since 1999 and our hosted Prophecy IVR Platform is one of the largest VoiceXML hosting platforms in the world. We have a rock-solid, ultra-reliable, secure, distributed platform for running your voice applications. To our knowledge, we’re the only ones in our industry to back up that belief with a 100% uptime guarantee… which means we pay you if we have any downtime. (Subject to certain conditions outlined on the page.)

We welcome questions like the ones above. We’re glad to talk about our platform for voice applications. (Contact us if you want more info.)

You can push your applications out into the “cloud”… there are many happy users of cloud-computing services from Amazon, Joyent, our own platform and many others. But you do have to ask questions like these and understand whether or not the application platform will be there when you need it!

P.S. And for those who absolutely want an on-premise product, a few years ago we made our software also available as a premise product… we also support some fascinating hybrid models I’ll write about in the future…

We’re very pleased to note that we’ll be part of three presentations coming up at the Communications Developer Conference (formerly “VoIP Developer Conference”) co-located with ITEXPO West 2008, September 16-18, 2008.

As shown in the Communications Developer Track 1 schedule, RJ Auburn will be up first on Tuesday, September 16, from 9:00-9:45am as part of a panel on “The State of SIP Application Development“. Here’s the abstract:

As SIP continues to be implemented in enterprise and consumer environments, applications are being developed that further leverage the IP capabilities of the clients. Two of these capabilities are location and presence — where I am, and what my availability status is. This presentation will address the various protocols and standards involved in presence and location, and how these apply in a SIP environment. It explains how SIP both enables complex applications that integrate unified communications with presence and location, but also some of the challenges that it presents.

Next, on Thursday morning, September 18th, Jose de Castro and I are back to back. The day actually starts off at 8:15am with what should be a fun talk on “Voice/Data Mashups” that includes Thomas Howe. After that, Jose’s on at 9:15-10:00am with “AJAX’s Impact on Telecom“:

AJAX has completely changed how developers approach the Web. A lesser-known and surprising phenomenon is AJAX’s impact on telecom and open telephony standards. This session will give the audience a brief history of speech technologies and how XML fits into the speech technology ecosystem. Jose will demonstrate how developers can apply their existing AJAX skills to build dynamic telephone applications, and why this development paradigm is ideal for telecom applications.

I (Dan York) am then following from 10:15-11:00am with “Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud“:

Today the industry is buzzing about cloud computing and pushing applications out into the network cloud. Google has brought out their AppEngine platform while Amazon offers their EC2 and S3 services and Microsoft and others prepare their own offerings. In this session, attendees will learn about what is involved with developing voice applications on cloud computing platforms. What options are out there? What do you need to look for in a platform? How can you get started? The session will include demonstrations and prepare the attendees to return home and get started.

We’ll also have a booth there and have now also become a Platinum Sponsor of the event as well. We’re a huge fan of developer-centered conferences (hence our strong past support of ETel and then eComm) and we’re looking forward to seeing how this one goes co-located with the large ITEXPO show. If the Communications Developer Conference is not yet on your agenda for the fall, we’d definitely encourage you to check it out!

Technorati Tags: conferences, voxeo, dan york, rj auburn, jose decastro, sip, voip, ajax, telecom, cloudcomputing, telephony, communicationsdeveloperconference

Hey, if Apple can make a big deal about their new ads, why can’t we?

Well, okay, so our new ads aren’t video… they aren’t on TV… they don’t feature a “x versus y” theme… and even with over 30,000 members of our developer community, that doesn’t even come close to the millions of fanboys (and fangirls) who will watch the Apple ads!

Still, we thought we’d share the new ads with you. As you can see, the main focus is on www.voxeo.com/free, our landing page that introduces people to both our hosted platform and our premise-based Prophecy software and let’s them easily choose one or the other.

Let us know what you think… which do you like better? (Both are in use.) Do you have any other suggestions?

P.S. They look way better in animated action, so please do head on over to ivr.tmcnet.com to check out the animations!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, advertising, ivr, voip, applications

Technorati Profile

While we’ve written about job openings in the past, it’s kind of fun to be able to talk about a new opening across the pond in Europe. Yes, indeed, we’re hiring a Senior Technical Manager for our European operations. Full details are in the job posting, but here’s the top bit:

Established US company seeks accomplished UK-based Technical Manager to help grow European operations.

You should have experience of networks, telecommunications and software.

Chance to help build a technology team in an exciting growth industry while leveraging the established team and infrastructure of the US parent.

Challenging work at an open-culture, profitable, pre-IPO, cutting-edge technology company.

The position will initially be home-office-based but will move to our new UK office once that is set up. More details about the position and how to apply are in the job posting. We’re excited to be expanding more into Europe and we’re looking for some great folks to join our efforts. Please apply today!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, jobs, uk, europe, voicexml, sip, voip

It’s always nice to win awards, but even nicer when they are unexpected. A few weeks ago I received a call from Frost & Sullivan with the news that Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Platform and Hosting services had won their North American Award for Product Innovation. Frost & Sullivan doesn’t solicit nominations. Instead, their analysts track new product launches, R&D spending, products in development, and new product features and evaluates them based on the degree of innovation and customer satisfaction. The Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Innovation is presented each year to the company that has demonstrated excellence in new products and technologies within its industry. Voxeo won for its Prophecy IVR Platform and Hosting services. Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Gaurav Sundararaman said:

“Voxeo has achieved substantial return on investment over the last few years. Its technical versatility and excellent customer service, coupled with its ability to cater to rising enterprise demands has made Voxeo a worthy recipient of the 2008 Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Innovation.”

We issued a press release earlier this week and we’ve got the full report available for download here.

In light of some of our recent news releases (see also our blog post) where we reference “Voxeo’s patented platform architecture“, the question naturally has been raised: “do you really have a patent on your architecture?”

Yes, we do!

Back in September 2000, our co-founder and current CEO Jonathan Taylor filed an application for what was eventually issued in July 2005 as US Patent # 6,922,411: “Networked computer telephony system driven by web-based applications”. (You can also read it at Google Patents.)

Here’s the abstract:

A networked telephony system and method allow users to deploy on the Internet computer telephony applications associated with designated telephone numbers. The telephony application is easily created by a user in XML (Extensible Markup Language) with predefined telephony XML tags and easily deployed on a website. The telephony XML tags include those for call control and media manipulation. A call to anyone of these designated telephone numbers may originate from anyone of the networked telephone system such as the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone System), a wireless network, or the Internet. The call is received by an application gateway center (AGC) installed on the Internet. Analogous to a web browser, the AGC provides facility for retrieving the associated XML application from its website and processing the call accordingly. The architecture and design of the system allow for reliability, high quality-of-service, easy scalability and the ability to incorporate additional telephony hardware and software and protocols.

The two major claims (the other 13 claims build off of these) are:

1. A networked computer telephony system, comprising: a plurality of Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents being hosted by web servers on the Internet, each of said XML documents constituting a telephony application associated with a specified call number and including telephony-specific XML scripts with tags instructing how a telephone call to the specified call number is to be processed; one or more application gateway center accessible via the Internet for receiving and processing said telephone call, said one or more application gateway center individually further comprising: a webpage retriever for retrieving the XML document associated with the specified call number; a virtual machine for running a set of telephony-specific opcodes; and a telephony scripting language parser for interpreting the XML scripts in the retrieved XML document into said telephony-specific opcodes for execution on said virtual machine to process said telephone call.

9. A method of processing a telephone call to a specific call number, comprising: providing an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document associated with the specified call number, said XML document constituting a telephony application and including telephony-specific XML tags instructing how a telephone call to the specified call number is to be processed; posting said XML document to a specified location on the Internet; providing a directory for locating said XML document by the specified call number; receiving said telephone call on the Internet; retrieving said XML document at the specified location looked up from said directory with the specified call number; providing a virtual machine for running a set of telephony-specific opcodes; parsing the XML scripts in the retrieved XML document into said telephony-specific opcodes; and executing said parsed opcodes on said virtual machine to process said telephone call.

For those of you who, like me, enjoy reading about network architecture, the full patent text gives great insight into both the Voxeo network architecture and also into how “telephony” has evolved over the years into what can be done today (once you get over the patent language).

So yes, we do indeed have a patent on our architecture!

P.S. Bonus points to any astute observers who noticed before that we have listed this patent for quite a long time in the footer to our Evolution developer portal.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, patents, voip, telephony, telecommunications, xml

You’ve seen our Evolution developer portal, right? It’s home to over 30,000 developers who have collectively built over 55,000 voice applications. It’s used by everyone from some of the largest companies out there running their customer service applications on our commercial Prophecy Hosting service to tiny startups using just our free developer accounts to look at how they can add voice to their new Web 2.0 site. On the back end, it’s a massively-scalable redundant cloud-computing infrastructure that executes applications and provides connectivity to the Internet, the traditional phone network (PSTN) and the ever-evolving SIP infrastructure, plus handles all the billing and management issues.

Now imagine this:

What if you could have your OWN custom-branded version of our Evolution site?

What if you could have a voice application platform that you made available to your customers so that they could build voice applications?

What if you were:

• a carrier/service provider looking to provide additional services to customers such as hosted IVR that could earn you additional revenue?

• a vendor of telecommunications equipment without a hosted IVR/application offering looking to quickly add such an offering?
• a large enterprise looking to enable your internal business units to easily and quickly create voice applications without necessarily needing to engage with IT or professional services groups?

Now let’s take it one step further and imagine this:

What if you could do all of this without having to provide/run/maintain the infrastructure?

No servers to provision. No infrastructure to build. No software to upgrade. No system administration. No connections to the PSTN to worry about.

Now stop imagining… that’s exactly what we announced today: availability over our IVR and SIP hosting infrastructure as a completely re-brandable Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Now, you, too, can have your own branded voice/IVR/SIP application platform. You can sign up customers and have them run (and develop) their own VoiceXML/CCXML/SIP applications. If you want, you can charge them and bill them by the minute.

All by way of your own completely rebranded web portal. No need to mention Voxeo - in fact, your customers never need to know. It’s your service offering. It’s your platform. We just provide the cloud behind it all - and remove all the infrastructure worries. Need it to grow more and run more applications? Need more inbound phone numbers? Need to make more outbound calls? You don’t worry about that… our cloud adjusts automagically to handle your needs. We provide the IVR virtualization or SIP virtualization layer. You just get to focus on building applications.

From a graphical point of view, it basically looks like this[1]:

Now the obvious concerns when contemplating a move like this include: How reliable is the platform? How secure is the platform? To answer, I’ll point to these parts of the news release:

Voxeo runs four fully redundant, proven, and patented hosting facilities from geographically diverse locations in the US and Europe. These facilities house over 800 servers today, each capable of processing over 200 concurrent phone calls. Through Voxeo’s patented platform architecture, this cloud-based, multi-server infrastructure appears to customers as a single virtualized, multi-tenant IVR system with nearly unlimited scalability. Thanks to Voxeo’s network diversity customers know their IVR failover and scalability requirements are comprehensively addressed. The hosted offering is completely managed and controlled using Voxeo’s brandable online customer and developer web portal, which includes Voxeo Designer, a flexible Visio-like visual telephony application development tool. Enterprise applications and telephony resources interact with the platform via standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML, HTTP, SOAP and SIP.

Voxeo has invested over $50m in the delivery of its IVR hosting network and continuously adds new capacity as customer demand increases. Voxeo’s platform includes comprehensive call control features to make, take, route, and connect calls; as well as robust voice media features to play, record, conference, recognize, and synthesize speech in 12 different languages. Voxeo will open a fifth hosting facility in Europe this year and anticipates launching facilities in Asia and other markets in 2009.

Obviously for customers serious about our PaaS offering we’ll go into more detail. We are also one of the only ones in the industry to offer a 100% uptime guarantee (or we pay you) and our PaaS offering can be configured in such a way to fall under this SLA.

I’d note that this Platform-as-a-Service offering isn’t just some nice theory… it’s out there being used today by a very large customer as an OEM platform. It’s very real.

Interested in learning more? Would you like to offer a complete (and branded) voice application platform to your customers or users? If so, drop us an email to sales@voxeo.com or use that phone thingamajig to call +1-407-418-1800.

[1] Although to be completely accurate, all those arrows should have an arrowhead on both ends because the information flows in both directions.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, platform as a service, paas, voice, voip, voice applications, telephony, ivr, ivr virtualization, sip, sip applications, voicexml, ccxml

In the weeks and months ahead you’ll hear us talk more and more about “cloud computing” as that term becomes increasingly mainstream (as I did in our Speaking of Standards blog last week). To us, it’s not at all a new concept as it’s what we have been doing with our platform since we launched way back in 1999.

With our hosted platform, we give you a massive computing cloud upon which you can run your voice applications. You just create the application and let our platform (i.e. our “cloud”) worry about scaling, redundancy, computing power, etc. (Our Quick Start Guide gives an overview.) There’s no need to worry about how many “ports” you have or how many server instances or what type of CPUs you are using. All of that fades away. You develop your voice applications (IVR apps or SIP apps) and run them… and our cloud takes care of all the infrastructure.

Of course, if we are doing to talk about the term “cloud computing”, it helps to provide some definition. On this note, I have to really hand it to the folks over at Joyent who compiled this excellent video of responses to the question “What is cloud computing?” from attendees at the recent Web 2.0 conference. Links to the people you’ll see are available on Joyent’s weblog (”Joyeur”) but courtesy of YouTube here is the video:

While Joyent is focused on providing cloud computing for rich web applications, the responses in the video are equally true for the voice applications that we support on our cloud computing platform. (And, like Joyent, we are strong believers that any cloud computing needs to be based on open standards to avoid vendor lock-in.)

Ultimately, what we now call “cloud computing” is the fulfillment of the dreams many of us have had since the early days of computing… creating a massive “cloud”, comprised itself of numerous smaller clouds, which let your applications “just work” and allows you to focus on building killer applications and not having to worry about the infrastructure to run those applications.

It’s a pretty amazing time right now - and we’re thrilled to be part of it all!

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, voxeo, joyent