In this week’s Developer Jam Session, Serving the Social Customer: Scaling Your Support for Twitter, Facebook and more, I touched on how to use VoiceObjects to create an application that interacts with users over Twitter. The steps are rather straightforward:

1. Create your application in VoiceObjects (and include a text layer).
2. Deploy the application to an Internet-accessible VoiceObjects Server.
3. Create a “bot” at IMified.com that points to the URL of your VoiceObjects application.
4. Link that bot to the appropriate Twitter or IM/chat accounts.

For this to work, you naturally need to have an IMified account, which are free to developers if you don’t already have one.

You also need to make one critical addition to the URL for your VoiceObjects server when you enter the URL into the IMified bot configuration. You need to add this text to the end of the URL:

&vsDriver=173&User-Agent=IMified

For example, your URL might be:

http://myserver.com:8070/VoiceObjects/DialogMapping?VSN=testService&vsDriver=173&User-Agent=IMified

With that, your app will be all set to communicate out to Twitter or the various chat networks via IMified!

For more detailed information about this process, Tobias Göbel, wrote up a great post last year called “How to IMify your voice application” that goes through the steps.

Voxeo University wants to provide an outlook for training courses (with FREE are free of charge) in early 2011:

Training Center Beijing:

• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (FREE): March 1-2
• Prophecy Installation and Administration: March 3-4
• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE): March 7-8
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE): March 9-11
• Voxeo Prism Essentials (FREE): March 28-29

Training Center Cologne:

• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE): Jan 31 – Feb 1
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE): Feb 2-4
• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (FREE): Feb 21-22
• Prophecy Installation and Administration: Feb 23-24
• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE): Feb 28 – March 1
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE): March 2-4
• Developing Text and Mobile Web Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop: March 17-18

Training Center Orlando:

• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (FREE): Feb 14-15
• Prophecy Installation and Administration: Feb 16-17
• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE): March 7-8
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE): March 9-11

Looking for other courses or dates? Please send your request to university@voxeo.com.

We expect an update for our Voxeo University web site and online registration soon, so please stop by now and then to check our updated training news.

Have a peaceful and bright Christmas season! Your Voxeo University team

Join our Developer Jam Session on November 30, 2010.

In this Developer Jam Session, Dan York, Director Conversations will show you how Voxeo’s tools and platforms can help you scale your usage of social channels. You will learn how to monitor Twitter account and take action on incoming messages or mentions. You will see how to send urgent notifications via SMS or voice based on certain keywords that appear in tweets. You will learn how you can craft appropriate automatic responses based on what customers send via Twitter. You will see how an automated app can assist the person monitoring a Twitter account in collecting information to provide a response. And… you will see how all social interaction can be tied into the same analytics and application you use for other interaction channels like voice, SMS, IM and mobile web. Finally, you will get a view of how these services can be extended to other social services like Facebook.

Register today

Date: November 30, 2010.

Time: 8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European.

Looking forward to welcome you in this session.

Would you like to learn how to build massively scalable Unified Communications applications using Voxeo Prism?

Register today for our upcoming Developers Jam Session on Thursday, October 28, 2010, at 11am US Eastern.

Voxeo’s Wei Chen will introduce you to the Voxeo Prism platform and show you how to install and manage the server. He will walk through a sample application to show the basic application structure and deployment and leave you with information about how to get started.

Voxeo Prism is a carrier-grade converged communication platform. It supports both popular Web technologies and communication technologies such as SIP and XMPP. It comes with full media capabilities such as conferencing, media playback and recording. It also supports advanced speech technologies such as text-to-speech and speech recognition. Voxeo Prism Communication Server is based on industry standard Java Servlet architecture and supports Java Servlet/JSP, SIP Servlet, XMPP Servlet, and Java Media Control APIs.

Join us for this developer jam session on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 8:00 AM Pacific, 11:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European.

REGISTER NOW

P.S. If you can’t attend the Thursday session, the webinar will be available for later viewing from our Jam Sessions web page. If you sign up, we’ll make sure to let you know when the archive is available for viewing.

Looking for VoiceObjects 10 or Prophecy 10 training during November? Maybe some of these classes will fit into your calendar:

• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (Nov 8-9) FREE TRAINING
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (Nov 10-12) FREE TRAINING
• VoiceObjects Installation and Administration (Nov 15-16)
• VoiceObjects for User Interface Designers (Nov 15-16)
• Developing Text and Mobile Web Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (Nov 17-18)
• Grammar Development (Nov 19)
• Prophecy Overview (Nov 22-23) FREE TRAINING

Please refer to Voxeo University for more information and online registration.

Well, that exact quote cannot be found in the Sherlock Holmes novels from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But it is used so often that it got “common use”.
And it fits perfect related to our latest enhancement of VoiceObjects (all versions!):
WATSON
Watson is a real elementary new tool for you and your communication with Voxeo Support regarding any VoiceObjects issue.

What is it all about?

Ever stumbled on “What data to send to support”?
Then the next quote comes into account:
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892))
As Voxeo Support always aims in getting better, we would like to get rid of these uncertainties.
For you to get the best support in the shortest time possible.
For us to avoid theorizing on your issue and getting lost in false assumptions.

Watson will help both of us!

Watson is a tool to collect all data of interest from your VoiceObjects instance. It will gather logs, settings, database information and some other things.
All these information go into one archive which can then easily be uploaded to the Evolution portal when opening a ticket or when support is asking for more data.

What is it not?

Watson is not designed to analyze your information
It is just the collector of information.
Therefore “You see, but you do not observe.” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)) is also true.

Analyzing your information is a task for the support team.
Additionally, we will be very happy to help you understand the file contents for your own assessment of issues!

Details?

Please see the knowledgebase article on Watson for a more detailed usage description.
The nice thing about Watson is that you can use it in older versions of VoiceObjects too – just get the setup archive from the knowledgebase article and get started!

Now some of you might think – “Hey, I have seen something similar already”. Yes, we copied ourselves. Shamelessly
Watson has been inspired by our Prophecy “Perry” tool which is located in your local Prophecy installation.
So in case of an issue while running Prophecy Pro on your premises you might be asked to run “prophecy run perry” and Watson.

Nice, isn’t it?
Many thanks to Jochen Fischer for this tool!

In the upcoming jam session, Andreas Volmer and Martin Mauelshagen will talk about ”Voxeo VoiceObjects – Reporting and Analytics Best Practices”.

With (voice or multi-channel) applications created in VoiceObjects, comprehensive reporting and analytics comes out-of-the-box: VoiceObjects Analyzer reports help you understand how callers use the application, where they struggle, and what the task completion rates are. In order to make best use of this highly integrated platform, call flow developers should be aware of how their implementation design decisions influence reporting.

In this webinar, we will create simple call flows using Module, Menu, Input, Layer, and Business Task objects, make test calls, and show the results in VoiceObjects Analyzer standard reports. Our aim is to show how the value of reporting can be maximized by making proper design decisions.

We will try to make this webinar useful both for absolute beginners and for VoiceObjects veteran developers!

REGISTER NOW 

Date:
September 29,02010
Time:
8:00 AM Western, 11:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European
Speakers:
Andreas Volmer, Presales Manager EMEA
Martin Mauelshagen, Business Intelligence Engineer

Looking forward to welcome you in this session.

Interested in Prophecy 10 or VoiceObjects 10 training? We still have some space to offer in the following classes:

Training Center Orlando

• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE training): Oct 25-26
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE training): Oct 27-29
• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (FREE training): Dec 6-7
• Prophecy Installation and Administration: Dec 8-9

Training Center Cologne

• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (FREE training): Oct 4-5
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (FREE training): Oct 6-8
• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (FREE training): Nov 22-23
• Prophecy Installation and Administration: Nov 24-25

You can easily register online. For more general course information please look here.

Join our upcoming developer jam session on August 26, 2010.

In this jam session, Stefan Besling will introduce VoiceObjects On-Demand, a major new capability in the upcoming VoiceObjects 10 release.

Now you can combine the power of the VoiceObjects environment with the convenience of Voxeo’s proven hosting infrastructure in a seamlessly integrated package.
Develop, deploy, and manage your apps more easily than ever before and use our new hosted application analytics to monitor traffic and understand caller behavior.

Date: Thursday, August 26, 2010

Time: 8:00 AM Western, 11:00 AM Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European

Did you ever wonder what’s the best way to call a stored procedure in a relational database server from your VoiceObjects call flow implementation? As you might know, the new Database object was added with VoiceObjects 9.1, and it greatly facilitates the task of executing SELECT, INSERT and UPDATE statements in a database server. However, it just doesn’t deal with stored procedures. In many projects, however, database content must be accessed through stored procedures, while direct use of DML (Data Manipulation Language) commands (such as SELECT or INSERT) is a no-no.

So, we went ahead and created a generic VoiceObjects Connector implementation that should be useable in most if not all instances where database integration via stored procedures is required. It was implemented as a CGI connector – that is, the connector code will be deployed as  a web application in a web application server (such as Tomcat), and communicate with the VoiceObjects Server via XML/http. It supports calling stored procedures with any number of IN and OUT parameters of all kinds of data types, and deals with result sets that may be returned by  the stored procedure. Plus, it leverages database connection pools that are configured and maintained on the web application server.

If you’re interested, find all you need to know about this generic “database stored procedure connector” in this new Knowledge Base article. There, you’ll find background information, installation and configuration instructions, as well as the actual download of the connector including the associated Java sources.

PS: Note that the implementation of this new CGI connector actually builds on the Java Servlet framework for CGI connectors that was presented in this recent blog post on VoiceObjects back-end integration.