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.