Voxeo Talks

If you have been watching our @voxeo Twitter account, you may have noticed a few references to a “@tropo” account… yes, indeed, we’ve decided to give our Tropo.com cloud communications service its very own Twitter account at:

http://twitter.com/tropo

If you are a Twitter user, please do follow the Tropo account to keep up on the latest changes and advances with Tropo.com. While you are at it, you may want to check out the Tropo Blog if you haven’t done so in a while, as Adam, Jason and others have been adding lots of great tips and tutorials lately.

P.S. And if you aren’t following @voxeo on Twitter, please do! We’d love to stay in touch with you that way…

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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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THE CLOUD MUST BE OPEN!

Can we say that any clearer? What is the point of running your applications “in the cloud” if you are locked-in to using a single cloud provider?

Here at OSCON yesterday, Tim O’Reilly stood onstage in his keynote and spoke about centralized services and databases and their “natural tendency toward monopoly“. He and others here continue to sound the alarm and warn that our increasing reliance on “the cloud” brings with it the danger of relying on cloud services that will simply lock us in to new proprietary systems and protocols.

We agree.

At Voxeo, we don’t think you should be forced to use a particular cloud telephony service simply because they are the only one who supports the protocol or language you want to use. When we launched Tropo.com back at eComm in March, this was one of our underlying concerns:

How do we prevent vendor lock-in for cloud telephony?

How do we make it so that our customers can develop their applications on Tropo.com, but yet have the freedom to take those applications and run them on some other provider’s service if they want to?

In looking at it, we saw the fairly obvious route that will no doubt seem radical to many:

We are making the Tropo.com source code available as open source. 

Yep… we’re opening the cloud. As our CEO Jonathan Taylor said (and yes, he actually did write this):

“Since 1999, Voxeo’s core mission has been to make telephony easy, effective and free of lock-in. We’ve been tearing down the walled gardens of telecom and replacing them with an open and accessible environment,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Nothing demonstrates this commitment better than Tropo’s completely open standards foundation and open-source availability. Unlike cloud vendors that use open-source but offer little back to the open-source community, we’re showing how cloud computing can be both completely open for end customers and concretely beneficial to open-source developers.” 

As both the news release and the post on our Tropo blog indicate, today marks the start of the process. We’ve made available two of the components that make up Tropo.com:

• Tropo SIP Servlet, which implements the Tropo core Java API for telephony applications and a mechanism to host a wide variety of programming languages on top of that API. The Tropo SIP Servlet is built on the Java SIP Servlet standard, JSR-289. SIP Servlet platforms are available from many vendors including Voxeo, Oracle, Avaya, and Redhat. The Tropo SIP Servlet uses another standard, the IETF’s MRCP standard to control audio interaction during calls. By open-sourcing this technology, we hope to support a wider variety of MRCP servers, and ultimately support any media platform that implements the Java Media Server Control API, JSR-309. 
• Tropo “Shims” for Groovy, JavaScript, Python, PHP and Ruby programming languages. Tropo Shims adapt the Tropo core API for use in a specific programming language. Open-sourcing these components enables Tropo to quickly support other programming languages. By releasing this code and working with the open-source telephony community, we hope to add support for additional programming languages such as Clojure, JavaFX, and Scala.

Over the coming weeks, Jason Goecke and Jay Phillips of our newly-announced Voxeo Labs team will release additional Tropo components that will allow you to run your own Tropo applications in private clouds, elastic computing services, or on your own servers in conjunction with Voxeo’s free Prophecy platform. Over the coming months, Voxeo Labs will work to support the widest variety of SIP Servlet and media server platforms, ultimately giving you a simple yet powerful telephony API that will work across the widest variety of platforms and vendors. Jason and Jay will be posting more information to the Voxeo Labs blog in the days and weeks ahead.

It’s all about having an open and interoperable cloud.

We’re excited about the possibilities – we hope you are, too. Will you join us now in bringing about open and interoperable cloud telephony?

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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.

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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It seems rather amazing that it was only a week ago at eComm 2009 that we announced the launch of Tropo.com, Voxeo’s new platform for developing voice applications in common programming languages such as JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby.

It’s been a crazy yet wonderful week! We’ve been thrilled by all the positive feedback we’ve received and even more so by the number of Tropo developers we’ve seen sign up. If you missed out on the announcement last week, here are some pointers to learn more:

• a video of Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor announcing Tropo at eComm and the set of slides that accompanied the launch

• the Tropo.com website where you can sign up for a free developer account and also learn about the simple pricing
• the Tropo documentation, including the quick introduction, the API Reference and the Tutorials
• slides from the Tropo tutorial given by Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn at eComm
• over 140 sample Tropo applications written in JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby and covering a range of different application types. Some voice-centric apps like an auto-attendant… some voice mashups that give you voice access to certain services (like traffic reports, top music download lists, New York Times articles)… and some, um, “interesting” apps like the Monty Python quote server or the role-playing game someone wrote. We also announced the availability of these applications via git and Github.
• a developer contest where we will pay $100 for each selected sample app
• the Tropo FAQ which answers many questions we’ve received
• new ways to receive support for writing Tropo apps, including web forums, IRC and Skype chat
• and, of course, The Tropo Blog, where we’ll be bringing you all sorts of news about Tropo, examples of applications, sample code and much, much more.

Here at Voxeo we’ve been very excited about the reception of the Tropo launch and are already looking at how we can enhance the platform and what additional languages we’ll be adding (believe it or not, we’ve had several requests for Lisp!). We do hope that you will sign up for a free Tropo account and get started creating voice applications in programming languages you already know. And please… do send along any feedback you have, either through the web forums, as comments to this blog post or even as email. We’d love to hear what you think of it and also where you would like to see the Tropo platform go. Most of all we’re excited to see what you do with the platform!

P.S. And if you would rather develop voice apps in VoiceXML, CCXML or CallXML, you can of course sign up for a free developer account at our evolution.voxeo.com developer portal and get started there. With the launch of Tropo we are in no way reducing our award-winning support for XML telephony. We’ll be continuing to enhance and expand XML support as well… but with Tropo we’re now opening up development of voice applications to a whole new range of developers.

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Technorati Tags: tropo, voxeo, voice, applications, mashups, ecomm, python, php, javascript, groovy, ruby

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