Voxeo Talks

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

UPDATE: In answer to several questions I’ve received, yes, I did record this presentation and will make that available soon. Once I do, I will also link it to the slide presentation so the slides can be viewed in sync with the audio.

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As I mentioned previously (also here), I was at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) last week up in Portland, Oregon, giving a talk on “Mashing Up Voice and the Web Through Open Source and XML“. It was fun to be back at OSCON for the first time since 2000 when I had been out there as the head of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) and was talking then about Linux certification. It was great to see so many people who I knew from back in those days who are still very active in Linux and open source activities.

It was also quite frankly great to be out there not speaking about VoIP security but rather talking about voice mashups and XML! Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy speaking about VoIP security and do it all the time (including next week at ClueCon) but as a speaker it’s sure nice to have some variety. It was also fun for me in this talk to dive down into the weeds and step through code line-by-line, something I haven’t done in quite some time in a presentation (but used to do all the time when teaching training classes).

Another fun aspect of the talk at OSCON was that Evan Prodromou, the founder and main developer of the open source identi.ca microblogging site was sitting there in the audience. Since most all of my demos involved adding voice to identi.ca, he was very interested in what I was showing and we had several great conversations later.

Anyway, my slides are now available through SlideShare, and I’d definitely welcome any comments or feedback on the slide set (either here or over on SlideShare) as I’ll be using some aspects of these slides in other talks:

I’ve received a good number of positive comments and evaluations about the talk and am glad that so many folks found it helpful. The one negative comment I’ve received was that a couple of people were really looking to see how they could add voice to their web interface and all my demos showed how to use a voice interface to interact with web sites. It’s a fair critique. I mention that you could do “click-to-call”, but I didn’t actually show this feature with a demo. I was originally planning to include a demo of putting a conference widget onto a web site, but in the end decided not to include it because I liked the other demos better and only had ~45 minutes for the whole presentation. Another time, though, I’ll probably include such a demo to provide both perspectives. (Meanwhile, I think that’s a great blog post to put up on our Voxeo Developers Corner blog in the next bit.)

Speaking of our Voxeo Developers Corner blog, I’ll also be taking each of my demos and stepping through them section by section in a series of posts over on that blog. Look for those to appear soon.

And, of course, if you’d like to try out any of the demos yourself using the code in my presentation, just head over to our Evolution developer portal and sign up for a free developer account and start creating applications.

P.S. Please do let me know if you do anything cool with linking voice into identi.ca (or Twitter) as it’s a subject I’m rather interested in. You can follow me there on identi.ca at identi.ca/danyork

Technorati Tags: SIP, slides, voice, voice applications, voice apps, voice mashups, voip, oscon, oscon2008, voxeo, mashups, voicexml, ccxml, identi.ca, microblogging, twitter, conferences, presentations, dan york, danyork

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!

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

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

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.

Technorati Tags: applications, voxeo, developers, callxml, xml, voicexml, mashups, ccxml, apis