Voxeo Talks

Over the next couple of months you’ll get a chance to hear from us and meet us at a couple of upcoming conferences.

First, from July 21-25 I’ll be up in Portland, Oregon, at O’Reilly’s OSCON 2008 giving a talk on “Mashing up Voice and the Web through Open Source and XML“. As the intro says:

With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the web let us quickly and easily access information from multiple data sources, how do we extend those mashups to the world of the phone? How do we bring the old world of voice and telephony into the new world of the web, social networks and social media? And how do we do that using open source tools and open standards?

The session description gets into a bit more about specifically what I’ll be addressing. It should be a good time! As you can see from the schedule, OSCON is a strongly developer-focused show and so it should be a great time connecting with developers out there and talking about our platform. Speaking at this show is a bit of neat experience for me personally, too, as I spoke at one of the first OSCON’s back in 2000 when it was still called the “Open Source Conference” and was held in Monterey, CA. I know a good number of folks in the O’Reilly orbit so I’m looking forward to connecting with lots of people out there.

Next up, both RJ and I will be speaking at SpeechTEK, August 18-20 in New York City. In fact, we’ll have a team of Voxeons there as we’ll have an exhibit booth and all sorts of things going on at the show. (More on that in later posts.)

RJ will be speaking first on Monday, August 18th, along with VoiceXML Forum founder Ken Rehor on the subject of “The Impact of W3C standard languages“:

The publication of W3C standard languages, such as VoiceXML and CCXML, has dramatically changed the speech application design process. This session discusses some of the efforts to extend and validate the use of standard languages. Learn how the call control language can work with SIP and VoIP to implement an extensible SIP softswitch. Discover how the VoiceXML Forum’s certification program has impacted the cross-vendor interoperability of VoiceXML by VoiceXML platform vendors.

Given our huge focus on open standards and RJ’s direct involvement as chair of the W3C’s CCXML Working Group, you can expect this session to deliver a wealth of information! (Hmmm… how high can I set the expectation bar for RJ? Hmmm… “he’s going to show how open standards solve world hunger!”… no, that’s a bit too high! RJ is, though, an excellent presenter as you may get a glimpse of from his past slide decks.)

I’ll follow with a session on Tuesday, August 19th, called “Securing CCXML and VoiceXML Applications“:

How secure are your speech applications? As the usage of both VoiceXML and CCXML continues to explode, and VoIP usage continues to grow dramatically, especially within enterprise environments, it is increasingly important that you ensure that applications and services are not open to attack. Learn about the potential vulnerabilities in a system using VoiceXML or CCXML, what you can do to secure these systems, and how you can develop a strong architecture.

Given my VoIP security background, it’s somewhat predictable that I’d be talking on this subject, eh? Seriously, though, it’s an area that doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of thought and so I’ll be taking a look at what the real risks are and how you can look at addressing them.

If you are going to either OSCON or SpeechTEK, please do leave a comment here or drop us an email and let us know. We love to meet face-to-face with blog readers and/or customers/developers. As much as we are able to do so (not sure yet), we’ll make the presentations available through this site. Stay tuned for more info - and we look forward to potentially seeing some of you in either Portland or New York!

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, conferences, rj auburn, dan york, oscon, oreilly, oscon2008, speechtek, speechtek2008, voicexml, security, voip security, ccxml, mashups, xml

One of the fun aspects of giving your product away for free is that you really have no clue what people will wind up doing with it. So we were delighted to learn that our premise “Prophecy” product as well as industry standards we support like VoiceXML and grXML were included in a new book, “Mobile Web Development“, new available from Packt Publishing. (UPDATE: I subsequently learned that the author did contact us some time back about permission to use some screenshots, etc.)

The book’s author has a blog and in his entry today about the book writes this (I obviously added the bold emphasis):

Mobile Web Development shows you how to build a mobile presence for your web applications and sites. It covers targeting different mobile web browsers, sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages, accepting mobile payments, and developing voice- and touchtone-response systems.

The book illustrates every technique with practical examples, showing how to use these development methods in the real world. Along the way we show how an example pizza delivery business can use these methods to open up to the mobile web. The book is fast paced, yet touches upon relevant concepts. I had a great ride while I was reviewing the book. I was actually surprised at how fast the book moved - covering important topics in just enough detail, and moving on to the next!

There is a whole lot of technologies I covered in the book. The examples are done in PHP with XHTML Mobile Profile. But I also covered: AJAX, Wireless CSS, WAP 2.0, Tera WURFL, MyMobileWeb, Mobile Web Toolkit, Image Server, GAIA Image Transcoder, HAWHAW , ready.mobi, Nokia’s Mobile Internet Toolkit , SMIL, Voxeo’s Prophecy server, VoiceXML (VXML), grXML, Frost library, WALL, WURFL, SMS, MMS, mobile payment gateways, mobile widgets, Mobile AJAX, Android, Google Gears, and Dojo Offline.

The blog entry goes on to talk more about what the book offers developers. It sounds like a great book and I’m looking forward to seeing a copy (since I actually have no idea what he said about us!). We do see the whole mobile space as a huge growth area and welcome developers to look at using either our on-premise Prophecy or our hosted Evolution platform to build their apps. (Check out the docs available at either of those links!)

Technorati Tags:
books, mobile web development, nirav mehta, voxeo, prophecy, voicexml, vxml, grXML, mobile

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new weblog: “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. In this weblog we will be giving you tips, tricks and tutorials to help you develop applications on our platforms. As you are probably aware, there is a huge amount of information available in the documentation and forums found on our Evolution developer site. What our goal is with this blog site is to point people to some of the nuggets of gold buried within the pages of Evolution. Members of our staff will highlight some of the great tips they have found and other information they think might help you build even better voice applications on our platform.

The blog is off to a great start already with Matt Henry’s initial post, “Certified Tech Tip: Using SISR-formatted grammars with Prophecy 8“, where he demonstrates what SISR-formatted grammars are all about. The post attracted some comments and Matt is already planning a follow-up post. Expect to see more along these lines from Matt and his team in the weeks ahead.

I also kicked off a series on voice mashups and Twitter today with a post “Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 1: Who will win the 2008 SuperBowl? (A mashup in CallXML.) where I show how you can create a voice application that sends its output out to the Twitter micro-blogging service. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more articles in that series.

If you are interested in developing voice applications, we do encourage you to check out the “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. There’s also an RSS feed if you would like to subscribe and stay up-to-date with our posts.

Technorati Tags:
applications, voxeo, developers, callxml, xml, voicexml, mashups, ccxml, apis

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.