Voxeo Talks

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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Are you a developer working with voice or communications applications in the San Francisco Bay area? Or will you be in SF next week for VoiceCon or Enterprise 2.0? Interested in learning more about “voice mashups”, cloud-based voice, “recombinant telephony” and other innovations?

We (Voxeo) are joining with Orange Labs for a special edition of Orange Spotlight focused on the coming “wave” of mashups involving cloud-based voice technology, innovations in messaging, and realtime web. On Wednesday evening, November 4th, we will be hosting a collection of developers and strategists working at the edge of the current art in hosted contact center, IVR, speech, and multimodal technologies who are all gathered for the purpose of sharing knowledge and inspiration. Some of the participants include:

• Thomas Howe of voice mashup fame
• Voxeo – Dan York and Jason Goecke
• Rebelvox – Tom Katis
• Ditech Networks – Jamie Siminoff
• LiveOps – Tony Simek

and many more. If you are a subject matter expert or have an active interest in the future of telephony, this will be an evening of interactive discussion on this exciting area. The event is from 5:30 – 8:00pm at Orange Labs’ facility in South San Francisco near the SFO airport.

Space is limited so please email me (Dan York) ASAP if you are interested.

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We’re very pleased to note that Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn will be speaking early next Tuesday morning at VoiceCon Orlando 2009 on the subject of voice mashups. His panel session is “Voice Mashups – Tool or Toy?” and is from 8:00-8:45am on Tuesday, March 31st. The description is:

What’s a voice mashup, and why should you care? This session will explain how different application and services elements can be combined in an ad hoc manner by end users drawing upon enterprise resources, to create “mashups.” We’ll look at the uses for mashups, where the elements of a mashup come from, and how they can benefit your end users.

KEY QUESTIONS:

• How do you get started with voice mashups? What elements will you need to purchase, and what existing elements in your network can be included?

• What do you have to do to make elements available for mashups?
• What’s the users’ interface for a voice mashup, and how do you provide it to them?
• Do you need to maintain some control over what users do within a mashup-enabled Web Services environment?
• Why should you do this? What can voice mashups do for your end users that can’t be done another way?

The folks at VoiceCon asked both RJ and the other presenter, Marlon Machado from IBM, to actually show mashups in action, so I know RJ’s going to have some fun stuff planned. I expect he’ll be doing some demos of Tropo.com (here’s a good summary of our Tropo announcements) and showing some of the cool mashups we’ve come up with, some of which are found in the Tropo Sample Applications and some of which we’ve written about on the Tropo blog. RJ’s a great presenter and if you are at VoiceCon I’d encourage you to check out his presentation.

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P.S. And yes, if you looked at the VoiceCon schedule earlier, I (Dan York) was slated to give this presentation but due to some scheduling issues cannot attend. RJ graciously agreed to speak in my place. Given that he’s been heavily involved in mashups for years, he’s definitely got the background.

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Technorati Tags: voicecon, voxeo, rjauburn, mashups, voice, applications

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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

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