Now that Revision 1 of VoiceObjects 9.0 is available and Prophecy 10 can be previewed, it is time to look toward the bright future again.

VoiceObjects has always offered the Control Center, which gives you an up-to-the-minute view of what’s going on in your deployment and lets you take action. The information available in the Control Center covers e.g. current call volumes as well as general status information on Infostore etc. You can activate application changes, deploy and undeploy services, take server instances down for maintenance, and more.

Coming up during the remainder of this year, you will also be able to access deployment-related reports directly from within the Desktop for Eclipse Control Center:

If you’re familiar with the VoiceObjects architecture you will know that we use a Server-Instance-Service paradigm: Applications are deployed as services onto logical servers, which in turn can be run on multiple instances in a cluster to facilitate load balancing and failover.
Reports will be available on all three of these levels, covering e.g. the number of sessions over time for various ranges.

Similarly it will be possible to check e.g.  on load distribution within a cluster to make sure that each instance carries its fair share.

Or to dig into call durations for individual services to see how callers fare.

There will even be direct access to Business Task information, so you can see right from the Control Center not just whether an application is up and running, but whether it actually does its job of giving callers what they want.

Sounds good? Then wait until you hear what else is in store

To learn more, contact us, follow us on Twitter – or visit us in New York at SpeechTEK 2009. We’re in booth 800 and look forward to meeting you!

One thing that’s so great about VoiceObjects Server is its multi-channel capabilities. This has been introduced way back in 2007. Design an application once – deploy it on any channel available on modern handsets, including voice, video, text, and mobile Web, and benefit from common maintenance, deployment, reporting, and analytics. Customers like T-Mobile Czech are embracing this to provide better support to their customer base (see also this announcement).

One thing that’s so great about Voxeo is our commitment to emerging technologies. Voxeo’s recent acquisition of IMified again demonstrates that we are at the forefront of any development within the industry that promises better self-service experience for the mobile customer. We have coined a term for this:

Unified Self-Service™

With IMified, developers can build applications that interact with users over instant messaging (IMR – Interactive Messaging Response). The beauty of IMified lies in the fact that it provides a staggeringly simple API to access various different providers of IM: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, Jabber, … Plus even Twitter, and – brand-new –  SMS text messages. Together with VoiceObjects, IMified extends the scope of our Phone Application Server to all these new modalities, which are technically all part of VoiceObjects’ text channel.

The following picture shows the high-level architecture of IMified with VoiceObjects:

This blog post is about how to build your first IM bot using VoiceObjects. Believe me, it takes longer to read this text than to build, deploy and test the app. If you are slow reader, that is…

How to set it up

Short version:

1. Create a text application in VoiceObjects
2. Set up a bot in IMified and point it to your app

That’s it!

Well ok, here are slightly more verbose instructions:

1. Install VoiceObjects Developer Edition 9.0 R1 (or use your existing VoiceObjects 9.0 R1 installation)
2. Create an application of your choice and provide prompts and grammars for the text channel
   1. Hint: If your application isn’t going to become multi-channel, you can leave the Channel layer at Default.
   2. If you have never built an application for the text channel before, you might want to read chapters 7 – How to Use Layers and 10 – How to Support Multiple Phone Channels of the Design Guide.
3. Deploy that application (e.g. by clicking Test Application in the context menu of your root Module object, in case you’re using VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse)
4. Register at www.IMified.com and create a developer account
5. Click Create a New Bot
6. Configure your bot
   1. Give it a bot name
   2. Give it a screen name. This will be the name (plus @bot.im) under which your bot will automatically be accessible via Jabber and Google Talk. For all other networks, you need to create accounts there first, which you can then associate with your new bot.
   3. Configure the bot URL. This must be the URL pointing to your VoiceObjects Server on which you deployed your app. Example: http://myserver.com:8070/VoiceObjects/DialogMapping?VSN=testService&User-Agent=IMified&vsDriver=173
      1. Use your VSN if you don’t deploy to VoiceObjects Desktop for Eclipse’s embedded VoiceObjects Server (if you do, testService is the fixed name for your service)
      2. Add User-Agent=IMified&vsDriver=173 to the URL, so that VoiceObjects Server knows this is an IM session based on IMified
      3. Make sure your VoiceObjects Server is reachable from the outside Internet world
   4. Click Create new Bot

That’s it! Now open Google Talk or any Jabber client, invite your bot to your contacts (the screen name plus @bot.im) and start a chat! If you have created accounts on other IM networks and activated them on IMified, invite these contacts and start a chat there!

How to move on from here

Wondering what kind of apps you can build with this? Well, think about any customer self-service or other portals that you could automate – or that you have automated already over IVR. Go ahead and IMify those! You are basically extending your customer interaction to other channels, giving your customers more options, accommodating the young generation that might be chatting more than talking these days… Have a look at the following interaction. It stems from our sample application, Prime Telecom. This application had been text-enabled for long now. With the IMified integration, chat is another means of communication that is – simply – THERE. Just use it!

Stay tuned for more things to read about the IMification of customer self-service applications. I plan to write something about usability, UI, and implementation best practices soon. Also, we plan a Developer Jam Session on this topic in October. Announcements will follow soon!

As usual, feel free to add comments or questions to this post.

Finally, if you’re in New York City during this week of August 24, please make sure to visit us at SpeechTEK in the Marriott Marquis! It’s the unique chance to see our 20-netbook cluster in action, serving thousands of calls on multiple phone channels using cheap and power-sipping hardware. You can find us in booth 800. We’re looking forward to talking to you.

Seems like yesterday that we released VoiceObjects 9. And still here we are with Revision 1  (R1) of VoiceObjects 9.0.

Yes, it fixes a couple of issues that we found or that you reported to us (thanks, and keep the feedback coming!) – but more than that it is chock-full of new features and functionalities to the point that merely calling it a revision is really hiding its light under a bushel. So this blog post gives you a high-level overview of what you can expect to find when you step up to R1.
It’s available immediately over here and on the VoiceObjects Service Portal.

Desktop for Eclipse
One of the new features coming in Desktop for Eclipse (including Developer Edition) you may already have seen in a previous blog post: The ability to switch between standalone and network mode at startup and from the VoiceObjects menu. Very convenient if you frequently change your working environment.

Another convenience function introduced with R1 is the ability to backup all of your projects at once. Simply select the new entry in the VoiceObjects menu and define a location for the backup. You can even choose between separate export files, a single combined ZIP archive, or all of the above.

Finally, the Search view has received a complete makeover. It now presents search results in individual tabs, giving you the ability to keep multiple search results open at the same time. It also shows you a lot more detail on the search conditions, both within the tab header itself and in the corresponding tool tip. Providing these additional capabilities was very high on the list of developer requests, and we’re happy to respond to this feedback.

Do let us know how the newly expanded search works for you!

Texting
In the unlikely case that you may have missed it: IMified has joined the Voxeo family, giving you access to all major Instant Messaging networks. Blending neatly with the existing VoiceObjects multi-channel approach, you can now augment your applications to also work as IM “bots” by simply running them with the new IMified driver. Part and parcel of our Unified Self-Service vision:

To be honest, it’s less of a vision by now – it’s reality you can put to use today!

A functionality used by many of our customers is what we call Service Chaining: Shepherding the caller through a number of consecutive applications that give the external appearance of being a single one. Often this is e.g. a shared initial application that accesses the backend for CRM data, followed by the  respective application dialled into by the caller (as identified e.g. by DNIS).
The way this was done so far could produce ugly intermediate pages in the text-based channels that required explicit caller interaction to move to the next page. Therefore R1 now uses standard HTTP redirects to trigger invisible and seamless service chaining in these channels.

CCXML
For certain types of applications, such as e.g. conferencing, VoiceXML in and of itself is insufficient due to its lack of fine-grained telephony capabilities. In these cases, Call Control XML (CCXML) is the language of choice – usually in combination with VoiceXML since CCXML in its turn is not particularly dialog-oriented. To make this combination as smooth as possible, R1 offers a new transfer type within the Transfer object, fittingly called CCXML. It gives you the ability to easily jump from a VoiceXML dialog into the enveloping CCXML application – and return to the dialog at some later time. For details, refer to June’s Jam Session.

Infostore
A lot of things have happened in R1 around Infostore, the repository for real-time caller behavior analysis.
First of all, it has completed its architectural transition to using a persistent on-disk message queue based on the popular Apache ActiveMQ. This means that regardless of database or network slowdowns or even outages, no Infostore data will ever be lost. Important peace of mind for customers who rely on the insight that Infostore delivers.

VoiceObjects Server provides sophisticated sampling options to ensure that statistically relevant data on caller behavior is collected while keeping the sheer data volume at a manageable level even for installations with very high call volume. This implies that even though Infostore is enabled, not every single call will actually write data to it.
In some situations it is of interest to know within the application itself whether a call has been selected to be written to Infostore or not – e.g. when your application logs custom data that only makes sense in combination with the corresponding Infostore entries. The new Expression object function ISLOGGINGACTIVE() does just that for all the relevant settings including utterance recording.

There’s also another enhancement for customers handling sensitive caller data such as credit card numbers: In addition to the long-existing masking option of using one-way encryption to obtain a protected yet unique representation for each caller input, it is now also possible to apply a generic, static mask that replaces every sensitive utterance with the same configurable string.

LoadTester
Those of you who participated in July’s Jam Session already know about the new LoadTester tool that allows you to easily stress test your application and deployment infrastructure. Starting with R1 it is bundled with the installer.

Grammar Management
With VoiceObjects 9.0R1 we are also proud to release the integration with Nu Echo’s NuGram IDE. Making full use of the Eclipse workbench approach, you can now develop, maintain, and manage your speech recognition (and DTMF) grammars in what is recognized by many as the market’s best grammar development tool. Bundled right into VoiceObjects Developer Edition,  a single download now gives you more power than ever before.
To learn more about VoiceObjects and NuGram, join us for our next Developer Jam Session on September 16.

And if you want to learn more about the Voxeo VoiceObjects platform in general, why not join one of our free training classes at Voxeo University? Seats are limited, so sign up today for the next courses in September and October by contacting us at university@voxeo.com!

Finally, if you’re in New York City during this week of August 24, please make sure to visit us at SpeechTEK in the Marriott Marquis!
You can find us in booth 800. We’re looking forward to talking to you.

Voxeo again underscores its leadership in partner and customer focus and support:

Voxeo University just started to offer free instructor-led training courses, taking place in both training centers in Orlando, Florida and Cologne, Germany, and for everybody! You just need to register and cover your travel expenses.

Until the end of 2009, the following VoiceObjects training courses are available for free:

Orlando:

• Aug 17 – Aug 18, 2009: VoiceObjects Phone Application Server
• Aug 19 – Aug 21, 2009: Development of Voice Applications for VoiceObjects Server
• Nov 02 – Nov 03, 2009: VoiceObjects Phone Application Server
• Nov 04 – Nov 06, 2009: Development of Voice Applications for VoiceObjects Server

Cologne:

• Aug 31 – Sept 1, 2009: VoiceObjects Phone Application Server
• Sept 2 – Sept 4, 2009: Development of Voice Applications for VoiceObjects Server
• Oct 5 – Oct 6, 2009: VoiceObjects Phone Application Server
• Oct 7 – Oct 9, 2009: Development of Voice Applications for VoiceObjects Server
• Nov 30 – Dec 1, 2009: VoiceObjects Phone Application Server
• Dec 2 – Dec 4, 2009: Development of Voice Applications for VoiceObjects Server

You can just choose “VoiceObjects Phone Application Server” for a two days overview about Voxeo VoiceObjects, without the need for any pre-knowledge or programming skills. Or take the full five days developer track including “Development of Voice Applications for VoiceObjects Server” back-to-back to get ready for the development of personalized self-services of any complexity.

The five days developer track also qualifies you to apply for a “VoiceObjects Certified Application Developer (Voice)” certification, which is typically operated as a one day remote exam later on.

Have you ever seen a similar offering from any other speech technology vendor or web server provider? Probably not!

Why is Voxeo doing this? The answer is very simple – we want to make our partners and customers successful and self-sufficient in deploying our technology and creating state-of-the-art unified-communication services. For us, the free training offering of Voxeo University perfectly complements our free Extreme Support.

And what’s coming in 2010? You may expect the same courses offered for free at least once a quarter at each location. Plus free Prophecy courses, web-based quick starters and more…

Class sizes are limited – so register soon for your free Voxeo VoiceObjects training this year! Check the VoiceObjects training Web site for more information including our training catalog and training calendar, or just send an email to university@voxeo.com!

Would you like to see more good news? Here they are! Also our training pricing for all other education services – including onsite trainings and remote certifications – has been made simple and inviting as never before. For more information, just contact us at university@voxeo.com.

That’s it for now. We are looking forward to hearing from you!