Voxeo Talks

A hybrid IVR platform is one that is available as a hosted/cloud-based solution and as an on-premise deployment. Just to be clear, we are not simply talking about two distinct offerings delivered by a single vendor. We mean one platform – offered two ways.   Benefits include the ability to migrate between deployment models at any time or to take advantage of both deployment models at the same time — with no changes whatsoever to your applications. That’s exactly what our partner Tele-Works did to enable Harris Computer Systems to serve a diverse base of utility customers.

Harris Computer Systems provides Customer Information Systems, billing software and other solutions to thousands of utility customers throughout North America. Harris recognized that IVR is a key component to a successful utility’s customer service department, but required a way to serve all of their customers – from the largest to the smallest – with one consistent solution.

Tele-Works provided a Voxeo-powered solution that uniquely supports both hosted and on-premise deployments, as well as inbound and outbound calling, from a single code base. The Tele-Works solution extends across Harris’ complete utility product portfolio, giving thousands of utility customers access to quality IVR at price points that were previously unattainable.  Read the case study here.

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Interested in learning about the advantages of hosted speech solutions versus on-premise solutions? Or why you should or shouldn’t have to choose? Want to understand the pros and cons of pushing voice applications out “into the cloud”? If so, please join us today at 2pm US Eastern time for a free webinar hosted by Speech Tech Magazine and including speakers from Voxeo, Angel.com, Contact Solutions and Nuance Communications. To sign up, please go to this URL:

http://www.speechtechmag.com/webinars/roundtable/12nov2009/vox2

Industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum (formerly Datamonitor and author of Datamonitor’s IVR short list report) will start the session with a market overview and the whole event is hosted by Speech Tech Magazine’s David Myron. Key questions to be discussed include:

• How the incentives built into a hosted agreement impact the customer’s long-term results;
• How the arrangement should be set up for you to realize maximum savings;
• The capabilities to look for when selecting a provider;
• The role of monitoring, reporting, and tuning;
• The role of caller behavior analysis;
• The impact of service-level agreements on performance, availability, and caller experience;
• The limitations when handling different interaction types, such as touch-tone, mobile, speech, and authentication/verification; and
• Integration with customer and third-party data/solutions to meet unique call requirements.

It should be an interesting collection of viewpoints given the mix of vendors. Again, it’s free, so please feel free to sign up and join us at 2pm US Eastern, 11am US Pacific. The session will also be archived for later viewing.

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Ever wished there was a simple way to do automated testing of your IVR or other voice application? Without a complex setup and without costing a great amount?

Back at SpeechTEK in August, our partners at Nu Echo announced the availability of their “Nu Bot Platform” for IVR Application Testing. Today, Andreas Volmer from our Cologne office published a review of Nu Bot and how it can interact with VoiceObjects over on the VoiceObjects Developer Blog:

NuBot – Automated end-to-end testing of IVR applications

Andreas provides some great screenshots and other information about how to use Nu Bot with VoiceObjects. He also points out that Nu Echo is still accepting participants for its Nu Bot Beta program, so you, too, can apply to try out the platform. I liked Andreas’ ending:

I can only recommend to get your hands on it and try it; it’s about time that we take automated testing more seriously in the IVR application business.

Indeed! Good to see Nu Echo getting this Nu Bot solution out there and I’d love to hear what others think of it.

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We see it all the time – companies who deployed a standards-based voice application platform only to find out that they’re still locked in. How does that happen? After all, isn’t portability a key tenet of open standards?

Of course it is, but the fact is that your provider doesn’t want you going anywhere. To accomplish this, many vendors bundle proprietary tools that make it difficult to switch solutions should your requirements change down the road. Even standards-touting VoiceXML providers often use proprietary call control and VoiceXML tags to cleverly move lock-in from the platform level to the application level.

At Voxeo, we keep our customers by providing them with a better product and better support – never by locking them in. Voxeo offers the only VoiceXML browser to pass 100% of the VoiceXML Forum’s compliance test suite, including all optional tests, and the world’s most deployed CCXML browser. We support all of the secondary W3C voice standards and more SIP capabilities than any other vendor. Equally important, Voxeo strictly adheres to the principles behind open standards. The result is greater choice, unmatched flexibility, lower costs and true portability.

Since Voxeo’s customers own their intellectual property, they can switch providers, engage different development resources, or change their deployment model if requirements change.

With Voxeo you are free to:

• Move from hosting to a premise or hybrid deployment (or the other way around)
• Use your application development partner or VoiceXML development tool of choice
• Leverage the Voxeo VoiceObjects service creation environment to “design once and deploy anywhere.” VoiceObjects applications seamlessly work across all leading VoiceXML platforms and across multiple channels, including voice, IM, SMS and the mobile web. These phone channels can share the underlying dialog flow definition, business logic and back-end access, drastically simplifying development, maintenance, and reporting.
• Use your speech vendor of choice; Voxeo offers free built-in speech recognition and synthesis, as well as support for any MRCP-compliant engine
• Choose from a variety of TDM and VoIP carriers
• Run your application on any standards-compliant platform, including those of our competitors

If you are interested in learning more about Voxeo and our standards-based platform, contact us today.

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If you subscribe to industry newsletters and frequent industry websites, you may have noticed an increased number of webinars and whitepapers on Outbound Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The recent flurry of activity isn’t surprising given analyst forecasts. For example, Datamonitor predicts the market for hosted Outbound IVR services in North America alone will more than double from an estimated $213 million in 2008 to $524 million by 2013.

Outbound IVR offers companies the ability to provide proactive customer service, deliver important notifications, expedite collections and more. But to truly put the advantages of this technology to work for you, it is important to understand the intricacies of successful outbound calling, how it differs from your Inbound IVR solutions, and the importance of delivering a cohesive customer experience.

At Voxeo, Outbound IVR is old hat. A large portion of our hosting business can be attributed to customers with high-volume outbound traffic. In fact, last month a Voxeo hosted customer made 1.3 million outbound phone calls in 1.5 hours. In our latest whitepaper, “The Ins and Outs of Outbound IVR,” we set out to share some of the knowledge we’ve gathered over the last ten years, including a few gotchas to be aware of, as well as success factors that will make your campaigns better and your customers happier.

Read Voxeo’s new Outbound IVR whitepaper now. You can also learn more about our Outbound IVR capabilities, including how to get started for free at www.voxeo.com/outboundivr

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Calling all German-speakers! Would you like to learn about Voxeo’s platform for developing voice/IVR applications… auf Deutsch?

Being a global company we do periodically offer webinars in languages other than English and with our VoiceObjects team right there in Germany, it is rather obvious that German would be one of those languages.

So if you are in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, are part of a German company or just want to learn about our products in German, please join us:

Voxeo – Sprachanwendungen auf modernen IVR-Plattformen – Schnell, zuverlässig, kosteneffzient

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM CEST

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/569322645

Space is limited, so please do sign up soon. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining the session.

For those of you interested, here is German text of the webinar invitation:

In diesem Webinar möchten wir Ihnen zeigen, wie Sie mit Hilfe standard-basierter Hosting- und On-Premise-Plattformen ein breites Spektrum von Telefonieanwendungen – sprachgesteuerte Self Services, Call Routing, Mehrwertdienste, Benachrichtigungen und mehr – nutzen können. Erfahren Sie, wie Sie durch den Einsatz der IVR-Lösungen von Voxeo Ihren Kundenservice verbessern und gleichzeitig die Kosten senken können:

Flexibilität – IVR on premise, oder doch lieber hosted? Variable Hosting- und On-Premise-Modelle ermöglichen es, Telefonanwendungen jeder Größe und Komplexität wirtschaftlich zu erstellen und zu betreiben. Wir diskutieren auch den hybriden Ansatz, in dem saisonal oder tageszeitlich erhöhte Anrufaufkommen durch Zuschaltung einer Hosted IVR abgebildet werden können.

Verfügbarkeit – Wir garantieren 100% Verfügbarkeit, 24×7. Voxeo’s Hosted IVR ist voll redundant ausgelegt über mehrere, weltweit verteilte Rechenzentren.

Analyse und Transparenz – Die IVR als Black Box? Nicht mit der Technologie von VoiceObjects. Sie bekommen Informationen darüber, wie Ihre Kunden Selfservices nutzen, wie bevorzugte Navigationspfade in der IVR aussehen, und wir messen die tatsächlichen Erfolgs- und Automatisierungsraten. In Kombination mit Ihrem CRM System erhalten Sie damit eine wertvolle Ergänzung für Ihre Kundenanalysen.

Jenseits von IVR – Wir schauen über den Tellerrand. Ideen und Lösungen zur Entwicklung von Unified Self-Services – eine Anwendung, mehrere Kanäle (z.B. Voice, Texting, mobiles Web, …)

Please do join us (assuming, of course, you can understand German).

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, voiceobjects, webinars, ivr, voip, telephony, telecommunications

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So what are the steps of pushing your voice applications out “into the cloud”? Where do you begin?

As readers may sense by now, I have a fascination with network clouds (and cloud computing), and in the latest sign of that, I’ve kicked off a 4-part series over on the TMCnet IVR Community that we are sponsoring. In this first article in the series, titled “Pushing IVR Into The Cloud, Part 1: Why Make The Move?“, I talk about why you might want to consider moving your voice application out into “the cloud”. Here’s the intro:

With the world of Voice over IP (VoIP) comes an incredible number of options for how we configure our voice systems. Telephony can now be massively distributed over large networks. Remote workers or agents can be easily linked in to the rest of the office system. And many options exist to connect your VoIP telecom system to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

In the midst of all of this is the challenge that application servers, such as those used for Interactive Voice Response (IVR), typically sit on a server somewhere in your network. And you need to make these application servers accessible to all the distributed parts of your network.

What if instead of running your IVR applications on a local server, you could run them “in the cloud?”

What if your IVR was out “in the network?” Accessible from all of your sites and from the PSTN? What if you could do this without adding to the load of your IT department?

In this four-part series, I’m going to explore what we are calling cloud computing and how you can push your IVR applications out into the network cloud. First, in this article, I’ll look at what cloud computing is and why people should think about it for IVR. Second, I’ll look at the security issues and what questions you need to be asking when considering a vendor for pushing your application into the cloud. After that I’ll discuss the key role that open standards play in allowing you to avoid vendor lock-in and I’ll conclude with steps you can take to make the move into the cloud.

The article continues on to talk about what cloud computing is, why you might consider it and why you might not consider it. Now the article focuses on “IVR” because… well.. it’s the IVR Community on TMCnet! However, you can pretty much go through that article and replace every instance of “IVR” with “voice application” or whatever term you want… the concept is the same.

As I note at the end, Part 2 will talk about the reliability/security aspects of pushing voice applications out into the cloud and the question: Can you trust the cloud to always be there for you?

Stay tuned for more… (and please feel free to let me know what you think as comments to this post.)

Technorati Tags: applications, voice, voice applications, ivr, cloud, cloud computing, voxeo, voip

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Do you remember the 1992 movie “Sneakers”? At one point the main characters are trying to get into a place, but first need to get through a voice verification system.  So they create a recording: “My name is Werner Brandis. My voice is my password. Verify me.” Voila! Since this is Hollywood, access is granted. A real-world, modern-day version of this type of technology is now available on the Voxeo Prophecy IVR Hosting platform – only unlike the movie, it can’t easily be spoofed!

Earlier this week, we announced the delivery of VoiceVerified’s voice authentication services on our platform.  Using their “Unforgettable Password(TM)” technology, the solution provides consumers with a more convenient and secure way to obtain sensitive information or perform transactions over the phone. Callers no longer need to remember PINs and passwords or divulge personal information such as their social security number or mother’s maiden name. Instead consumers can authenticate using their unique voice print.  And, unlike the voice verification system in “Sneakers”, VoiceVerified’s system asks the caller to authenticate by repeating a randomly generated series of numbers, eliminating the kind of “replay attack” that helped the heroes of Sneakers.  

We think it’s a great solution and we’re pleased to be working with VoiceVerified.  We’ve also published a case study that highlights some of the reasons why VoiceVerified selected Voxeo’s Prophecy IVR Hosting services.  You can check out VoiceVerified’s web site for more information about their products and services or contact them via email to learn about using their services with our platform.

What do you think? Do you see a role for voice verification services with your applications?

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Over the weekend we updated the version of the Evolution Designer application creation environment to version 8.0. This is the same version that shipped with Prophecy 8 earlier this year (with a few bonus fixes). Anyway if you have not seen the new version before you should definitely check it out as it greatly improves the usability of the product. It sports a brand new user interface and gets rid of the crusty old java applet and replaced it with a nice web 2.0 buzzword compliant UI.

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