Voxeo Talks

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At VoiceCon SF 2009 last week in San Francisco, I (Dan York) spoke about “Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA“. In the talk, I discussed what voice “mashups” are, gave a couple of examples, and then went on to show one of the Tropo.com examples found on the documentation page – the specific one I showed was the Yahoo!Weather example in python. I logged into my Tropo.com account, created a new application, indicated that I wanted to use a hosted file, copied/pasted text from the example, and then set up a phone number and IM address.

You can do all this, too, since Tropo.com accounts are free.

Here are the slides I used in my voice mashups talk:

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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!

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Over a past weekend I found myself in my local “big box” home improvement store (name removed to protect the guilty ) trying to find a specific part – a replacement switch for a ceiling fan. I had looked in all the places that were “obvious” to me… but couldn’t find it. I found myself wandering among the aisles looking for a staff person – but of course with it being a weekend the store was quite busy and no available staff could be found. My frustration level (and blood pressure) kept increasing as I found myself wasting more time looking for someone to help me find this part.

In that one moment, I completely understood the goal of Aisle411.

The concept is simple… pick up your phone, dial a number, ask where the product is and find out specifically where in the store it is located. No wasting time running around looking for an employee… no wandering around the aisles cursing… just getting right to where the product is and being able to keep on going. (Side benefit, I guess, of lower blood pressure!)

Now obviously there is a degree of coordination required between the big box retailer and the Aisle411 service. The Aisle411 folks need to be sure they have the latest and greatest inventory map loaded in – otherwise you’d get awfully frustrated with their service if it told you where something was and it turned out not to be there. But that’s their goal… and they have started out now with a St. Louis-area Ace Hardware and a Price Cutter grocery store in Springfield, Missouri. They indicate on their store locator page that they will be launching in more stores in the time ahead. (They also posted a video talking more about the service.)

There are a couple of interesting dimensions to this:

• You could use this service in advance of being at the store to know exactly where you need to go. You could call from home or on the way in (assuming that is allowed in your state).
• It’s pretty cool to me on a technological level that the advances we have in communications technology allow you to find out information about your local store by querying a global service located out in the cloud.

Obviously we’ll see in the time ahead how well these initial installations go and how widely the Aisle411 technology gets adopted, but as an individual consumer I can say that I’d personally like to see this available as an option. In the case of my spare part I was seeking, I eventually did find someone in another department who was able to point me to the right location, but having a quick way to call would have saved me a good bit of wasted time.

Note: Aisle411 is a Voxeo customer, but that’s not why I’m writing about them… I just think the service is a great idea.

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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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One of the questions I frequently get asked is:

“So what kind of applications do people create with your platform?“

The challenge in providing a simple answer is that over 34,000 developers have created over 73,000 applications on our hosted platform since 1999 and there have been over 30,000 downloads of our premise platform since 2006 – and each premise platform could support any number of different types of applications. So the answer really is:

Pretty much anything that you can do with the phone – someone has done it on our platform.

But that doesn’t usually go down really well… people are looking for more concrete answers. That answer is, though, the truth. We’ve seen people build everything from your basic IVR system / auto-attendant to Facebook conferencing applications to PBXs to bad weather school notification systems. We’ve seen anonymous dating services… and we’ve seen companies create large interviewing systems to screen potential job candidates through a voice application. Then there was the company that used our platform to create a very cool game where you called in via a phone and interacted with their website. And then there are a very large number of companies running their customer service toll-free numbers on our platform…

It’s an incredible range that is hard to simply categorize. Here’s a selection of the type of applications we’ve seen people build:

There are naturally many more than those listed. The fun part about providing free developer accounts on our hosted system or letting people download our software for free (without even requiring any questions to be answered) is that we have absolutely no idea what people will do with it. So it’s always inspiring (and sometimes entertaining) to find some blog post out there where someone is doing some kind of wacky mashup we would have never even remotely thought of.

In fact, I’ll be profiling one of those very cool mashups in the next little bit… (and if you have an app built on our platform that you’d like to have me write about, please do contact me as I’m glad to consider it).

Does this help explain a bit better “what kind of apps do people create?” Would you like to see more case studies? What would you find helpful?

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, voip, applications

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As I wrote about before, RJ, Jose and I were out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) next week earlier this month in Los Angeles and our slides are now available for viewing. I also have audio and video that I will be making available soon.

Meanwhile, enjoy the slides. Note that if you click on links to go to the actual SlideShare pages you can also download the slides in PDF form.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

The State of SIP Application Development, 9:00-9:45am

Our CTO, RJ Auburn, led off our presentations as part of a panel on SIP application development:

As SIP continues to be implemented in enterprise and consumer environments, applications are being developed that further leverage the IP capabilities of the clients.

RJ spoke about the state of SIP-based voice application development and how it all fits in within the world of unified communications. He had some great demonstrations of using SIP via CCXML and also SIP Servlets to connect voice applications to Twitter.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2008

SIP Trunking and Security in an Enterprise Network, 10:15-11:15am

On this day, I (Dan York) put on my VoIP Security Alliance hat and joined a SIP trunking session sponsored by Ingate Systems:

Panel discusses security misconceptions, challenges and requirements in this evolving IP communications landscape from each presenter’s perspective.

It was a fun talk to give and covered the many aspects of VoIP security – with an obvious focus on SIP trunking.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

AJAX’s Impact on Telecom, 9:15-10:00am

Jose deCastro started off our day on Thursday with a presentation about how AJAX (“Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) has changed the way we can do telephony development:

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.

Jose has been the lead developer on our Designer product that lets developers easily build voice applications through a web/drag-and-drop interface and this talk was a great one, especially for web developers looking to add voice into their apps.

Developing Voice Applications in The Cloud, 10:15-11:00am

I was up right after Jose talking about the whole movement to push application functionality out into “the cloud”. Here’s my abstract:

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.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, applications, voip, sip, sip applications, sip security, ajax, cloud computing, xml, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference

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Are you going to be out in Los Angeles next week (starting Sept 16, 2008) for the Communications Developer Conference or the co-located Internet Telephone Conference & Expo (ITEXPO) event?

If you are, please do stop by our booth #126 in the Communications Developer Conference area of the exhibit floor. We’ll have some great demos of Prophecy 9 and yes, we’ll be bringing our “fun” giveaway T-shirts to this show like we did at SpeechTEK.

We’ll also have three of us (RJ, Jose and myself) speaking at the event, which I outline in a separate post.

Come see us there – we’ll also be tweeting from the show so you can follow us at twitter.com/voxeo to see what we are up to at the show itself.

We look forward to seeing some of you out there.

Technorati Tags: conferences, voip, voxeo, voice, speech, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference, telephony, communications, telecommunications

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Today we are extremely pleased to announce our acquisition of Micromethod, a developer of SIP-based communication and collaboration software based in Beijing, China, and San Jose, CA. Micromethod CTO Wei Chen, now Chief Architect for Voxeo, reporting to CTO RJ Auburn, provided this video comment from the floor of SpeechTEK:

{seesmic_video:{“title”:{“value”:”Voxeo announces the acquisition of Micromethod”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://seesmic.com/video/PWaH9WbzIx”}}}

With the acquisition of Micromethod, we gain an Asian presence and also add three new products:

SIPMethod – an end-to-end platform for rapid development and deployment of SIP communication solutions. SIPMethod supports more than 30 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Java Specification Request (JSR), and W3C standards including SIP and HTTP Servlets, JAX-WS, JMX, and STUN. SIPMethod also supports converged SIP and HTTP applications, enabling flexible mashups of telephony, IM, presence, web 2.0, and SOAP/REST services and applications.

SIPoint – a comprehensive solution for SIP user collaboration, connectivity, routing, and messaging. SIPoint is built on the SIPMethod platform, includes SIP registrar, location, redirect, proxy, instant messaging, XCAP and presence services, adding support for 18 more IETF standards for SIMPLE, and OMA and 3GPP presence.

Horizon – a highly effective SIP firewall, NAT, and VPN solution. Horizon both enables secure SIP audio, video, and data connections and helps those connections traverse existing firewall and NAT implementations that block or break SIP-based collaboration. Horizon is also built on the SIPMethod platform. An H.323-compliant version of Horizon is also available.

You’ll see much more here on our blog site about these products in the weeks ahead. We’ve already incorporated Micromethod software in our new early access release to Prophecy 9 and will be offering much, much more in terms of integration in the future. In the meantime, you can read about SIP Servlet programming at the Micromethod developer portal or download Prophecy 9 for Mac OS X today and try it out yourself!

We welcome our new colleagues in both Beijing and San Jose and look forward to the incredible things we’ll be doing together!

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