Voxeo Talks

Have you checked out the Party Line application for Facebook that I wrote about a few weeks back?

Well, the folks at Equals have spent some time working on the application and listening to the feedback from users. They’ve made some changes to it and also clarified some of the usage terms. Here are the major changes:

• Removed the initial advertisement that people being called out had to listen to when they were put into a call. Callers now just get dropped immediately into the conference bridge so that you can start talking! Note that the person initiating the call still hears a brief ad while the service is connecting the other members of the call.

• Clarified in their FAQ that calls are at least for the initial rollout limited to a maximum of 15 minutes.

The team there at Equals is continuing to look at ways to improve the application and are definitely looking for feedback as well. If you haven’t checked it out, we encourage you to read our previous post and then simply get started using the Party Line application inside of Facebook.

We’d also note that Equals CEO Ajay Madhok recently gave an interview to The Social Times which has now been released as a podcast if you would like to know more about the company and what they are doing.

We’re pleased to see an application using our platform to bring voice inside of Facebook - and we look forward to seeing what they come up with next!

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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!

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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.

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