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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Today we are very pleased to announce that our IMified platform now lets you build applications that interact directly with Twitter. In fact, if you’ve already built an application (or “IM bot”) that interacts with the leading IM networks, adding Twitter support is this easy:

1. Register a Twitter name with Twitter
2. Add the Twitter name to your bot configuration (and go through the Twitter OAuth process)
3. Start receiving and generating messages to and from Twitter

That’s it.

Everytime someone sends a “@” message or a direct message (DM) to your Twitter account, the contents of that tweet will be sent to your application. Your app can reply back with more information, or really do anything else with that data.

Why might you want to do this? As we said in the news release:

As the volume of a company’s Twitter messages grows, an application on the IMified platform can scan incoming tweets and reply back as appropriate based on information in the message, speeding up the response time and allowing company staff to focus on more detailed inquiries. As another example, companies using Twitter as a customer service channel can create an application that will respond to Twitter inquiries late at night when customer service staff are not available. Similarly an application could scan messages and alert staff via IM or other channels when certain Twitter users contact the company or certain keywords appear in tweets.

“Think of all the typical information you gather at the beginning of a customer service interaction like the user’s name, account details, or a description of the problem they are having,” York continued. “Unlike phone-based IVR where a user has to work through menus, Twitter and other short-message communication services enable automated agents to supplement human support without putting a menu barrier in front of people. Automated agents can watch both public and private/direct Twitter messages and either respond with the appropriate information or make sure the appropriate person responds to the message.”

The IMified platform also supports outbound notification via Twitter and can be linked to other business processes and systems. A library, for example, can receive a query from a user about a certain book. When the book becomes available, the application can send the user a Twitter direct message with this information. In a similar fashion, a company can create a loyalty program that alerts users when specific sales or events occur. In both cases, the application can send automated messages from the same Twitter account used by company staff so that replies can be seen and handled by staff.

We’ve seen an increasing interest by companies in adding Twitter as yet another customer service / customer interaction channel. We want to help them expand and scale their Twitter usage.

For us it is all part of our broader “Unified Self-Service” vision where you can write an application once and have that application interact with customers in whatever medium they choose to contact you. I’ve drawn it this way:

That’s the vision we’ve been building for some time now… and we’re delighted to announce the addition of one part of the social messaging part of that picture today. Now… we’re excited to see what you all will do with it!

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, imified, twitter, microblogging, customerservice, enterprise, e2conf

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Lately I’ve seen a number of questions out there about “why do businesses use Twitter?” and after writing a response to someone, I decided I’d also post it here… We’ve been using Twitter for some time now for Voxeo in two ways:

1. as another way for people to “subscribe” to what we are posting to our blog site; and
2. at actual conferences/events, to relay where we are in the conference, when someone is speaking, etc.

You can see our feed – and subscribe – at http://twitter.com/voxeo

In the first case, I observed my own 1.5 years of using Twitter and noticed that I wasn’t reading RSS feeds nearly as much as I once was – but I was reading my Twitter feed all the time. So it seemed to me that for people like me we ought to offer the option to subscribe to our blog feed via Twitter. We still have RSS feeds and the ability to subscribe via email – now we just have a Twitter feed as well.

In the second case, when Voxeo has had a presence at a conference several times this past year, I have been tweeting out where some of us have been. For example, “RJ is now speaking in room D104″ or this one:

We did have someone who found me at the Voxeo booth at one of the events and said he knew I was there because I’d been twittering it out. So part of it is an experiment in seeing if we can connect with people at the various shows and events.

Now I’ve watched other corporations use Twitter for more two-way communication and while we haven’t seen that ourselves yet, I could see how it could be useful that way. Right now it’s more part of our continued experimentation with social media. Twitter and microblogging services are part of the continued evolution of the ways in which we communicate… so we figure we need to join the experiment to see how it all works.

How do you use Twitter?

Technorati Tags: voxeo, twitter

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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!

Technorati Tags: applications, voxeo, rjauburn, ecomm, ecomm2008, conferences, presentations, ccxml, twitter, mashups, voice, telephony

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Do you use Twitter? If you do, you now can follow “twitter.com/voxeo” and keep up-to-date with articles we post to these blogs. Why do this when you can also simply subscribe to our RSS feed for all blogs? Well, as I wrote about recently, some people who use Twitter a lot find they don’t use RSS subscriptions as much, instead relying more on what the read in their stream of Twitter updates. So, we’d like to help those folks out and provide a way they can stay up-to-date on all the articles we post here.

If you are interested, the gory details of what I did to connect our WordPress MU site to Twitter are available in our “Behind the Blog” weblog.

P.S. If you don’t like all these automatic notification thingamajigs and just want to keep returning to blogs.voxeo.com and hitting the refresh/reload button on your browser, you are perfectly welcome to continue doing so!

Technorati Tags: twitter

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