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.

Vote articles

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.

Comment on an article

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

• difficult to install
• costly to use
• hard to maintain

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

• expensive professional services
• downtime of the entire system
• days or even weeks of implementation time

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

• offers an easy-to-use graphical development environment
• supports team collaboration and user management
• runs self-service applications on multiple channels including voice, text and Web
• supports natural language dialogs
• provides dynamic call flows with individual and/or group-level personalization
• supports multi-lingualism
• offers automatic self-documentation of call flows and prompt lists
• enables easy reusability, modularization and shared libraries
• comes with inbuilt debugging and load, functionality, and regression testing tools
• allows easy management of port allocation and session partitioning
• offers tools for easy prompt management
• can be managed and monitored through SNMP and/or email notifications
• provides sophisticated reporting and analytics of system performance, caller behavior, and business metrics

???

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