Last Friday we gave you a heads-up that VoiceObjects 9 is available for download. Today we want to look at the release in some more detail and give you an overview of major new functionality that comes with it. For a full list of all enhancements and fixes, check the Release Notes that are part of the documentation in the download package. They are also contained within the Installation Guide.

Event Handling
If you build voice or DTMF applications, you’re familiar with the concept of “event handling” – how to deal with situations in which callers either don’t say anything at all (“No Input”), or something that the application does not expect at this point (“No Match”). Most of the time you want to handle these events by either just giving the caller another chance (e.g. “Sorry, I didn’t get that”) or by providing them with further assistance (e.g. “You may also enter your account number using the keys on your phone.”). Sometimes, however, when there are just too many of these events in a call, you may decide to give up and transfer the caller to a human agent to ensure they get the service they deserve.

VoiceObjects 9 introduces a new event type that makes this easier, called Invalid Answer Limit. It combines No Input and No Match events into a single counter for “invalid answers” and allows you to set a limit on them. So you can say e.g. that after four such events, no matter in which combination or order, the call is to be transferred to a human agent.

Of course, this new event type is fully integrated into the object-oriented approach delivered by the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform. In fact, the primary use case is likely to be that the root Module of your application defines a handler for Invalid Answer Limit that is then automatically applied in all input states of your application.

Text-To-Audio
In all but the simplest applications there is the need to present dynamic data to the caller – be it a package delivery date, an account balance, or a flight departure gate. For optimal quality and blending with the rest of the prompts, this is most typically done by using pre-recorded audio snippets that are assembled on-the-fly. Within the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform, this is referred to as Text-To-Audio (TTA).

VoiceObjects 9 further strengthens the existing rich TTA support by introducing the ability to reference existing dialog objects from within the sequence of audio snippets. Apart from being a logical extension of the previous capabilities, this is also a good example of enhancements driven by user feedback.

Resource Validation
Sophisticated applications frequently use thousands of audio files, often in multiple languages such as English, Spanish and/or French. The Storyboard Manager is a great tool for keeping track of all these files – and it got even better in VoiceObjects 9 by offering automatic resource validation. At the click of a button, it traverses all the various resource folders and makes sure that the required files are available.

You see at a glance whether files are missing, and if so which ones. A major time saver, and a potential life saver in making sure that your callers hear their prompts instead of static.

Logging
By default, the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform logs to rotating files with a variety of configuration options. Some of our large customers expressed the desire to integrate the logs directly with their monitoring framework the way that VoiceObjects already does with SNMP alarming and email notifications. So with VoiceObjects 9 we provide the ability to write to a syslog stream, either instead of writing to log files or in addition to it. One more way to ensure that there is a seamless path from the free Developer Edition on your laptop to a failsafe multi-thousand port deployment in your corporate network.

Support Chat
We take pride in our 24×7 Extreme Support that is there for you whenever you need assistance – because we are successful when you are successful. So to make it easier than ever for you to get in touch with us, we added a new Support Chat entry to VoiceObjects Developer Edition. Within seconds, you can start a chat with a member of our support team and get the information you need.

Never hesitate to make use of it – we genuinely love to hear from you and appreciate your feedback to make our products better.

Instant Messaging
As you will have heard, IMified has joined the Voxeo family recently. That’s great news since it expands your options in building outstanding phone applications even further – and with the built-in support for Instant Messaging and texting available in VoiceObjects since version 7.4, you can have multi-channel applications running in no time. We’ll have a separate blog posting on this soon, and we’re busy working on a deeper integration. This is going to be an exciting summer!

Finally, we’d like to remind you of and invite you to our Developer Jam Session for this month (on June 24, 11am Eastern), in which Tobias Göbel is going to present hands-on information on how to build powerful CCXML applications using the Voxeo VoiceObjects tools and Voxeo Prophecy. Hope to see you there!

Tags: VoiceObjects 9

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.