Never heard about Voxeo? Don’t know what they do? Never visited their Web site or looked at their offerings?

Join me for a guided Webtour to learn more about Voxeo.

We want to start our tour at their home www.voxeo.com.  Whenever you get lost during our journey I will pick you up there.

Arrived at voxeo.com? Perfect. To your left, you can see their core offerings:

• IVR platforms and hosting
• VoIP platforms and services
• IVR and VoIP developer programs
• and Voice Applications

Let’s visit those areas now. For those of you that may be interested only in specific areas you may use these shortcuts: Free hosted IVR, free IVR download, free SIP development, IVR platform, SIP platform, voice applications, Voxeo Blogs, Evolution, Contact

For all others, we will drive on to IVR platforms and hosting: Voxeo provides a proven, standards-based IVR software platform. Here are some facts:

• 100% Standards based IVR
• Supports W3C VoiceXML 2.1
• Supports W3C CCXML 1.0
• Supports W3C SRGS 1.0
• Supports W3C SSML 1.0
• Supports CallXML 3.0
• Supports touch-tone and voice entry
• Supports voice recognition and TTS
• Supports T1, E1, ISDN, or VOIP/SIP
• Supports voice authentication

The platform is available as follows:

You can try Voxeo’s IVR solutions at no cost, via the

• hosted Evolution developer portal or the
• free Prophecy IVR Platform download.

Let’s leave the IVR section and proceed to the VoIP platforms and services. The SIP Application Server is built around the world’s most proven Call Control (CCXML) engine.  For those of you new to call control, CTI and CCXML, let me take a short excursion.

CCXML is the industry standard for call control application development, created by the W3C.

CCXML can be used to create call control applications, including: Back to Back SIP User Agents (B2BUA), SIP redirect servers, SIP load balancers, Virtual or “hosted” IP PBX and call-center / ACD solutions, click-to-dial SIP call launchers, find-me-follow-me applications, and more.

When combined with the Prophecy SIP Media Server, CCXML can also be used to deliver speech-driven conferencing, call recording platforms, emergency notification / audio broadcast services, auto attendant applications, telephone surveys, unified messaging platforms, bill payment solutions, voice broadcasting services, and general speech or touch-tone driven IVR.

To learn more, Voxeo’s Prophecy SIP Application Server pages are a good place to visit.

Still roaming around? Got enough theory? Simply use the free Evolution Developer portal to build your own IVR or VoIP applications. If you haven’t built telephony apps before, visit the hosted Evolution Developer portal. If you have built apps before, or if you really need a local, downloadable VoiceXML / CCXML platform, you may also try the freely downloadable Prophecy Platform.

You don’t want to build an application on your own? Fine. In this case you may look at the ready-to-go, industry-focused IVR applications:

• General Enterprise IVR
• Call Center IVR
• Government Offices & Agencies
• Banks & Financial Services
• Utilities
• Healthcare
• Retail Sales
• Travel & Transportation
• Systems Integrators
• Telephony VARs

We have already arrived at the end of our short tour. I hope you enjoyed the tour and I hope to see you again soon.

Cheers!
Michael

My insider tip for you: The Voxeo blog provides interesting readings on standardisation, emerging technology, Voxeo labs and application development.

Here are some additional readings on the acquisition:

• The official press release announcing the acquisition
  
• Article in Information Week
• Article in SpeechTech Mag

Here are some of Voxeo’s viewpoints:

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

As you are probably aware by now, VoiceObjects got acquired by Voxeo.

During the past years, we have been able to create a software platform for self-service application development and analytics that is unique in the market. Many corporations world wide use VoiceObjects technology to successfully operate their phone self-services.

As Voxeo, we are now able to provide the complete technology stack to efficiently implement and operate self-services, including IVR and speech technology. And the best of all, Voxeo’s hosting offering enables you to develop and operate phone services without the need to build up and maintain your own infrastructure.

You are using an alternative IVR? Don’t be afraid. We will continue our strategy to provide an IVR-independent application development platform. More precisely, we will continue maintenance and will further extend our Media Platform Drivers to support all media platforms and new platform versions.

To learn more about what this acquisition means and what is next for the software, listen to this interview with Michael Codini, co-founder and CTO of VoiceObjects, hold by Dan York, Director Emerging Communication Technology, Voxeo.

You can download or play the podcast here:

[8:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Or you can watch on YouTube at:

When creating speech applications, being able to manage dynamic grammars is often a must. A few examples include

• Choosing from a user-specific list of accounts, reservations, transaction codes, …
• Asking the caller to identify with his password, date of birth, or security question;
• In a banking bill payment application, the “payee list” grammar can be dynamically generated based on the list of payees that has been set up by the user;
• Address capture: After asking the caller for the zip code, a “street” grammar can be generated dynamically with streets associated with the zip code.

Many more use cases for dynamic grammars can be found in the Nu Echo blog: Part 1 and Part 2.
Now, the question is: How to generate dynamic grammars? In particular, how to generate dynamic grammars at call time? The traditional approach is to create a JSP (or ASP, or PHP, or Perl …) page that is invoked at call time with a set of request parameters, returning the required grammar. Creating such pages is cumbersome at best.

Nu Echo, the VoiceObjects partner company specializing on grammar development tools, have come up with an interesting approach: They designed an easy-to-use yet powerful markup language for creating dynamic grammars. This Grammar Language extends the ABNF format with dynamic grammar directives that can access variables and objects passed to the instantiation service via an instantiation context. This context maps variable names to values.

Using this approach is fairly simple: You create a grammar template in ABNF format, maybe using the NuGram IDE. This grammar template needs to be uploaded (via HTTP PUT) to the Grammar Server (aka NuGram Server). At call time, the voice application instantiates the grammar, providing an instantiation context that contains the session-specific data via a HTTP POST command. This context must be provided in JSON format, a special string format representing, in a nutshell, structured key-value pairs. The Grammar Server hence creates the grammar which can finally be retrieved using a HTTP GET request.

Now, our idea was that while this sounds simple enough, it should be made even simpler for VoiceObjects developers. All the HTTP based communication with the Grammar Server that is going on behind the scenes should be automated. Also, creating JSON formatted strings shouldn’t be something VoiceObjects developers are bothered with.

What we came up with is the Grammar Server Connector that bridges between VoiceObjects applications and the NuGram Server. This connector uses NuGram Server’s HTTP API to upload, instantiante, and fetch dynamic grammars. All that the VoiceObjects developer has to do is, well, first create the grammar template. In the application, he maintains the instantiation context (i.e. the dynamic data that is known only at call time) in a Collection object. The Grammar Server Connector’s task is then to instantiate the grammar at call time.

To get you started with this new approach to dynamic grammars, I created a simple demo application that uses one single grammar template and a single, simple input state, asking the caller for a currency value – treating the actual currency (US Dollars, Euro, British Pound, Czech Koruny, Mexican Pesos …) as a dynamic value. You can download it, along with the installation package and comprehensive documentation here (scroll down to section “VoiceObjects Integration with NuGram Server”).