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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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.

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We are pleased to announce the launch of a new weblog: “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. In this weblog we will be giving you tips, tricks and tutorials to help you develop applications on our platforms. As you are probably aware, there is a huge amount of information available in the documentation and forums found on our Evolution developer site. What our goal is with this blog site is to point people to some of the nuggets of gold buried within the pages of Evolution. Members of our staff will highlight some of the great tips they have found and other information they think might help you build even better voice applications on our platform.

The blog is off to a great start already with Matt Henry’s initial post, “Certified Tech Tip: Using SISR-formatted grammars with Prophecy 8“, where he demonstrates what SISR-formatted grammars are all about. The post attracted some comments and Matt is already planning a follow-up post. Expect to see more along these lines from Matt and his team in the weeks ahead.

I also kicked off a series on voice mashups and Twitter today with a post “Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 1: Who will win the 2008 SuperBowl? (A mashup in CallXML.) where I show how you can create a voice application that sends its output out to the Twitter micro-blogging service. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more articles in that series.

If you are interested in developing voice applications, we do encourage you to check out the “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. There’s also an RSS feed if you would like to subscribe and stay up-to-date with our posts.

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