Voxeo Talks

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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While Voxeo holds regular technical Jam Sessions for our VoiceObjects developer community, this month we’re really jamming with a special-edition session on the business advantages of personalization. With personalization, self-service applications can automatically adapt to individual preferences and recent transactions for an improved customer experience, lower costs and untapped revenue opportunities.

Industry veteran and VoiceObjects founder, Michael Codini, will talk about how you can:

• Delight callers with personalization
• Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs
• Learn from customer behavior
• Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, recent transactions and more
• Deliver targeted offers
• Leverage investments in business intelligence

The online Jam Session will take place on Tuesday, June 16^th at 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 AM PST, 5:00 PM CEST.  You can register here.

Click here to learn more about our regular, monthly technical Jam Sessions.

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If any of you are at Genesys’ G-Force conference this week in Orlando, Florida, please do stop by the “Partner Pavilion” exhibit area and check out what our VoiceObjects team is there to demonstrate.

Given that we (Voxeo) compete rather directly with Genesys on an application platform level, you might wonder why we are there at their conference (and in fact are a sponsor as VoiceObjects).

The reality is that while our VoiceObjects service creation environment works wonderfully with our own Prophecy platform, it also works great with over 40 other IVR platforms, including Genesys’.

In fact, the beautiful part about using VoiceObjects as a development tool is that you are able to develop your applications completely separately from the IVR platform that actually executes your applications. Develop on VO and then deploy on Voxeo Prophecy, Genesys, Cisco, Intervoice, HP, Avaya, Nortel or other platforms.

Your development tool does not lock you into your deployment platform!

We see this as a great strength compared to so many of the other application development tools out there that wind up only working with usually a single application platform. Why limit yourself?

So we do have customers using VoiceObjects with the Genesys platform and in that light we are over at the G-Force conference this week talking with partners and customers about the power of VoiceObjects as a development tool. If you are there at the show, please do stop by the Partner Pavilion and say hello.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, genesys, g-force, conferences

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If you visited the VoiceObjects home page today, you may have noticed a new change.[1] Yes, indeed, our talented web team introduced some new changes including the spiffy logo seen over on the right.

We’re quite pleased with how the logo came out and look forward to introducing it throughout the VoiceObjects site and materials. Watch for more changes, too, coming across all of our sites. We’ve got some great things in the queue…

[1] And if you haven’t visited the VO page lately, why not check it out?

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects

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Okay, I admit, given that in my life I’ve bought a good amount of furniture from IKEA, it was rather fun to learn that IKEA Germany has launched a new self-service phone/voice portal using our VoiceObjects software. As the VoiceObjects news release states:

Swedish furniture retailer IKEA recently launched a new self-service phone portal designed, developed, and integrated by Excelsis utilizing the Voxeo VoiceObjects phone application server and development tools. The new phone portal provides IKEA customers with innovative self service options, including information about the in-stock availability of more than 10,000 articles, a store locator, information on delivery costs and payment details, and SMS notification services.

IKEA’s primary goal in deploying a new phone portal was to assure a high level of customer satisfaction. IKEA focused on automating common yet simple customer requests. More complex or unique customer requests are transferred quickly to IKEA service agents after the phone portal collects basic account information. This information is passed automatically to the customer service agent. In combination, IKEA’s focus on automating basic calls and quickly transferring other calls significantly reduces customer hold time and improves customer satisfaction. Finally, the new voice portal needed to provide a flexible and future-proof platform, allowing IKEA to quickly respond to ever-changing market needs while maintaining high call quality.

So if you are in Germany, you now can call in to this service and find out if IKEA products are available, where stores are and more. More information can be found in the news release.

Now if only there were an IKEA store closer to where I live now… I need to buy some new glasses to go with the ones we bought there 5 or 6 years ago…

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Technorati Tags: applications, voiceobjects, voicexml, voxeo, ikea, voice

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VoiceObjects Developer Edition 7.4 is available for download now.

Exciting new features of this release include:

• Support for 2-way SMS dialogs

  VoiceObjects 7.4 has expanded the text channel so that in addition to USSD dialogs text messaging from mobile devices using the Short Message Service (SMS) is now supported. The architecture follows a flexible, extensible adapter approach to be able to support arbitrary SMS gateways. Using the new functionality organizations can extend their automated self-service offerings to additional channels, providing users of mobile phones and messaging clients a powerful and efficient interface. Moreover, new customer groups may be entered by providing a means of interaction that is unmatchable low in cost.

• Security enhancements
  Two new user roles as well as several new capabilities related to password handling have been added to VoiceObjects user management to support deployments in security-sensitive areas.

• Newly supported Media Platforms
  Support has also been added in VoiceObjects 7.4 for the media platforms Nortel ICP and Voxeo Prophecy 9.0.
• New expression functions

  A significant number of new expression functions has been added to enable more convenient manipulation of strings and dates. There is also a new function to easily apply configuration settings in a bulk operation. Visit our blog to learn how the new functions can be used: Exploring the new Expression Functions in VoiceObjects 7.4 and Handling Test Case Data in VoiceObjects 7.4

You can download VoiceObjects Developer Edition 7.4 from
http://developers.voiceobjects.com/downloads/

To learn more about VoiceObjects 7.4 join our Developer Jam Session on January 14th.

Join us to stay up-to-date with the newest release.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, voice, applications, voice applications, developers, development

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So we’re pregnant, eh? At least, according to industry analyst Nancy Jamison…

I have to admit that of all the great coverage we’ve been reading over the past few days about Voxeo’s acquisition of VoiceObjects, the one post that definitely made me laugh the most was Nancy’s. I mean, when she titles her post “Voxeo Unified Communications Pregnancy Confirmed – no Due Date Announced” and starts her announcement coverage with this:

However, today, Voxeo announced a further acquisition, that when you dig down into it only confirms that Voxeo is heavily pregnant with a UC child, but just won’t admit the due date yet.

… well, it’s hard for me not to chuckle!

Thanks, Nancy, for the kind words… and yes, between our own Prophecy product, the SIP-based presence/IM products of Micromethod and now the development tools and multi-channel support of VoiceObjects, we have indeed assembled a wonderful communications toolkit… and more is on the way…

Stay tuned…

P.S. If you’d like to throw a baby shower for us, I’m sure we can come up with a wish list…

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, unified communications

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As you are probably aware by now, at 6am US Eastern this morning / 12noon in Germany, we announced our acquisition of VoiceObjects, the world’s leading provider of self-service application development and analytics solutions. Given that over the course of the past several hours, we’ve been posting various articles and podcasts about the acquisition, I thought it was time for a summary of what we’ve talked about today. Here are some of the viewpoints we’ve shared:

• Our news release announcing the acquisition

• What the VoiceObjects acquisition by Voxeo means for voice application developers… on our Voxeo Developer’s Corner blog
• Voxeo’s VoiceObjects acquisition further promotes the open standard of VoiceXML on our Speaking of Standards blog
• Emerging Tech Talk #010 – Voxeo acquires VoiceObjects and brings developers new voice application tools on our Emerging Tech Talk video podcast

I think it goes without saying that we’re all extremely thrilled on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by the combined potential of the two companies. In fact, we’re already seeing that potential be realized in some very huge opportunities that have come our way as a result of people within some large enterprises learning of the impending merger from one of the parties over the last few weeks. We’re looking forward to seeing what kind of even more amazing voice applications our customers will now create as we talk about and promote how well the tools of both companies work together.

From my own point-of-view, I look forward to joining with others within both companies in telling the story of how VoiceObjects application server and tools can be combined with Voxeo’s media server and application platform to solve real customer problems and more easily and simply build even more powerful voice applications. You can be sure that over the weeks and months ahead I and others will be writing more here (as well as on the VoiceObjects blog). It should be a very fun ride!

Meanwhile, if you haven’t watched our video introduction over on Emerging Tech Talk, let me make it even simpler for you by embedding the YouTube video here:

Keep watching for more… In the meantime, we’re celebrating a good bit both here in Orlando and over in Cologne, Germany! (As well as in our Beijing and London offices and wherever our other remote employees are…)

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voiceobjects, voicexml

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