The Voxeo Provisioning Guide has been updated recently. It now also covers the deployment of applications developed with VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse by using a local Prophecy 9 or Prophecy 10 installation. In addition, the use of the Prophecy IVR Hosting solution has been simplified. Find out more…
We’re into the holiday season, and to spread the joy we are releasing an Early Access (EA) version of VoiceObjects 9.1 – a preview of the next version of the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform, which is currently scheduled to reach GA in Q1/2010. In this post we’ll give you an overview of some of the major new functionalities that will be available, and that you can start working with today. Simply download the Early Access install from the VoiceObjects Developer Portal.
For those of you currently using VoiceObjects 9.0, note that we also released Revision 3, which you can download from the same place.
Database Object
Experience in lots of customer projects has shown us that an overwhelming percentage of Connector object implementations end up connecting to a database. So we decided to go ahead and create a dedicated object for this task – the Database object. It transparently manages the connection infrastructure, including pooling, and allows you to focus on the SQL statements to extract, insert, or manipulate data.
The Database object supports all standard databases (such as e.g. Oracle or SQL Server) as well as any custom database you may want to use so long as it offers a JDBC driver.
Simple Connector Mode
A different requirement for the Connector object came from developers and new users who quickly want to build their first VoiceObjects applications. They often have existing scripts (JSP, PHP, Ruby, etc.) that they would like to re-use without the need to convert it to the XML data exchange format utilized by the Connector object. The focus here is on simplicity, ease of use, and quick results.
So we added a “simple mode” to the HTTP Connector that performs a straight POST of the parameters defined for it and expects a single return value. This value can still be an XML structure, from which individual items may be extracted using the XPATH-based result mapping.
Menu Object Enhancements
Dynamic personalization is one of the particular strengths of the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform: Adjusting each call to the preferences, usage patterns, and needs of the individual caller.
One aspect of this can be the dynamic re-ordering of items within a menu, so that e.g. the most frequently used entry (such as “Account balance” in a banking application) is at the top. VoiceObjects 9.1 provides a new option on the Menu object to easily change the ordering of Menu items using a comma-separated list of entries.
When utilizing such dynamic re-ordering, specifically in DTMF-based applications, it is often desirable to also employ auto-numbering, i.e. to automatically assign DTMF keys to menu entries. With VoiceObjects 9.1 we have provided easier access to these assigned digits for instance to read them out within the respective menu item prompts.
Finally, each menu item can now also fill a variable with a result value that indicates which item has been selected by the caller.
Cache Standby
In deployments with a large number of services, there is often the situation that a small number of these services receive the vast majority of call traffic, while many of the other services are merely using up memory most of the time. VoiceObjects 9.1 therefore now intelligently puts such services into a standby mode in which they do not consume any resources, but still remain available for calls.
Control Center Reports
The Infostore repository gives a lot of insight into the status of a deployed system, such as call traffic over time, traffic distribution within a cluster, or caller success rates (as measured by Business Tasks). With VoiceObjects 9.1 graphical reports for key metrics are available right from within the Desktop for Eclipse Control Center. There is also a fully embedded Infostore now in Desktop for Eclipse, so you can start using these reports without the need to set up a separate database.
In addition to the new features described above, VoiceObjects 9.1 will also offer a number of other capabilities that are not yet included within the Early Access package:
Infostore Extensions
The Infostore repository provides a wealth of information on application performance and caller experience. And with each release we add more data to it to enable even more detailed reports. VoiceObjects 9.1 is no exception, and with it we provide among others
Utterance Validation in Textual Channels
In voice or DTMF applications, grammars define what callers are allowed to say within a given input state. In text and web applications, there often is free-form text input which the application then needs to validate explicitly. With VoiceObjects 9.1 we make this easier by allowing developers to define a regular expression pattern that the caller input needs to conform to. VoiceObjects Server automatically checks this and triggers a No Match event when appropriate.
To learn more about VoiceObjects 9.1, please join us for our upcoming Developer Jam Session on December 9, 2009 at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 5pm European.
On December 09th, Stefan Besling, VP Engineering at Voxeo Germany GmbH, will give you a preview of the new functionalities of VoiceObjects 9.1.
The new release VoiceObjects 9.1 offers a wide range of new functionalities including
Join us for this session.
In October we opened our support knowledgebase for the public use.
Now I can present two new functionalities to you (one of them was already pre-announced in my last post). Both will help you – these changes enable you to provide feedback to us.
As every other company we are looking out for customer feedback to enhance our offering. So if you tell us what you think about the knowledgebase as such or about a certain article this will really help us to get better!
You have from now on two options to do so. You can add your vote to an article (“Is the article helpful or not?”) and you can add a more detailed comment.
Below the knowledgebase article you will see the following:
This is the place where you can tell us how you think about this article – anonymously! Just click on the thumbs-up logo if that article helped you. In case this article did not meet your requirements click on the thumbs-down (I hope you’ll never do that again, don’t you?).
Please login into your Evolution page (evolution.voxeo.com or evolution.voiceobjects.com) to vote.
You can vote multiple times on a given page, but only the most recent vote counts – in case you changed your mind.
On the top of each article you will now see that the page has a second tab:
Open this second tab – and you will be able to see all comments for an article. And you will be able to add your own comment too!
To add comments to your page please choose the “add comment” link on the bottom of the comments page:
This will open a mask where you can add a comment – with a subject and your text:
Click “Save” to post your comment to the page.
Your comment will end in our support team – and from there we may add a response to the comment.
In case you think that a comment might not be appropriate – no problem, we are also standing by in case you send a mail to support@voxeo.com or open a support ticket in your Evolution account.
We will also be happy to receive a suggestion for a new article!
Err, no. But tell me, why is the IVR industry so behind? It seems as if the majority out there still believes it is normal for a premise IVR system to be
The only thing you can do with it that works is static touch tone menus to route calls, and changes as simple as prompt replacement or menu item deactivation require
Now with all what Voxeo is about, if YOU have followed what we have been doing since day 1, then YOU will know that all of the above is just not true and completely outdated. Go to www.voxeo.com/free, download our free SIP and IVR platform and service creation, administration and reporting environment, install it and build your first callable voice portal in less than 1 hour.
All of the above might have been the case a decade ago and earlier, in the 90s, but hellooo!? It’s 2009, VoiceXML is out there for 10 years, VoIP technologies such as SIP are becoming a de facto standard for voice communication and software vendors write platform-agnostic tools for all standards around voice automation such as VoiceXML, SRGS+SISR, SSML, CCXML and more.
Now I don’t want to write a marketing blog post on how simple things are with Voxeo products. What I want to write about is one particular topic that STILL comes up from potential customers:
“Can you export the applications to static VXML?”
But at the same time, they want a system that
???
And then they want to export the entire system to a static presentation markup file?
Think about it this way. If you were not to build a system to manage voice portals, but Web portals instead, of the complexity and size of an amazon.com, cnn.com, or ebay.com – with the multitude of individual pages (= dialog steps), text (= prompts), structure (= call flow), and content in general: would you ever ask a provider of such a content/application management system to add a feature to export everything to a static HTML file?
—–
Change takes time, effort, and can be painful. And with dinosaurs of the IVR industry out there that have managed to sell overly complex, costly, and difficult (let alone proprietary) systems in the past and still sometimes do so today, I somehow understand that people who need to buy a new IVR environment but don’t know as much about the underlying technology as they know about the much more predominant sister technologies of the ubiquitous visual WWW tend to look at it in a way that is nowadays simply outdated. In fact, the technologies underneath modern IVR are exactly the same as those of the Web. It is all based on XML over HTTP to deliver content via IP.
PLEASE, dear IVR industry, do a better job of explaining the world how easy it is in 2009 to build and run automated communication services, involving voice, text, Web, and more. It’s a joint effort! Danke schön.
Hello everybody,
GOOD NEWS: Overwhelmed by the reception of our first FREE training classes started this year, this outstanding offering will be continued and even extended in 2010! It includes the first FREE Prophecy training classes in Europe, learning how to use the industry-leading communications platform and what’s about industry standards like SIP, VoiceXML and CCXML.
First course dates have been published at
http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeouniversity/2009/11/20/training-dates-scheduled-for-q12010/
More courses will be added during the second quarter, e.g. “Installation and Administration of Prophecy” (2 days) and “VoiceObjects Development Best Practices” (3 days). The full training catalog and calendar for 2010 will be available soon – stay tuned! As always for any training request, please send your requests to university@voxeo.com.
See you next year!
Your Voxeo University Team
Visit Voxeo at eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference and Awards in the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, October 28 -30, 2009.
eComm was created to promote and accelerate communications innovation. Telecom, mobile, and to a lesser extend, Internet based communications had beed innovation stagnant for far too long. Yet the opportunities for innovation had never been greater. Those opportunities are only going to grow as drastic changes further impact the multi-trillion dollar a year telecom industry.
On October 29th, RJ Auburn, CTO of Voxeo will speak about “The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice”.
Find out more at www.ecomm.ec.
I found NuBot easy to master and a very powerful addition to my automated testing portfolio. 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.
It´s been more than 6 months since our Partner Nu Echo released NuGram IDE Basic Edition, a free Eclipse-based grammar development environment, and almost two months since we announced its integration into Voxeo´s VoiceObjects service creation environment. For this reason, Nu echo is currently conducting a survey to get feedback from the grammar developer community. Whatever your experience has been with NuGram so far, they want to hear from you. help them make NuGram an even better product!
On November 04th, Andreas Volmer and Ralf Rottmann will talk about “Smartphone Apps – A new Channel for Customer Care”. During this session they will show how to combine VoiceObjects with the mobile services platform from GrandCentrix in order to create state-of-the-art mobile apps that fit seamlessly into an existing multi-channel self-service strategy. They will demonstrate how to enable the multi-channel Prime Telecom demo service as a mobile app on the iPhone, building on one single service definition that can be deployed, in parallel, as an IVR, texting, mobile web, and mobile app/rich client application, centrally managed through VoiceObjects Server.
RSS FEED