Last week VoiceDays 2008 – the leading German speech technology event – took place. From the VoiceObjects perspective we are looking back to a really successful event. Numerous discussions indicate the growing demand for application development environments that provide independence of underlying IVR technology, that can handle multiple phone channels and modalities, and that provide powerful analytics.

During these two days participants of congress and tradeshow could attend numerous presentations; I want to share the VoiceObjects-related (primary German) presentations with you.

Three presentations were given by VoiceObjects customers, providing good insight into their experience with application development and deployment of automated self-services:

Daniel Hendling, T-Mobile International: Die integrierte Voice & Mobile Self-Service Strategie bei T-Mobile International

Marion Libossek, Telefónica o2 Germany: Der steinige Weg zum sexy Voice Portal

Christian Rosenberger, Swisscom: Das Swisscom-Sprachportal

My colleagues gave two presentations on multi-channel self-services:

Michael Codini, VoiceObjects: Die neue mobile Generation – Selfservice-Anforderungen in der Multichannel Kommunikation

Dr. Andreas Volmer, Multi-Channel Phone Services With VoiceObjects Server

And finally, I gave a presentation on analytics during the Demo-Forum session:

Michael Gill, Analyse- und Tuning-Tools: VoiceObjects Analyzer

Just a quick note on a successful phone service deployed on VoiceObjects technology:
D+S europe AG has won the „Best Value-Added Service“ category of the VoiceAward 2008. The VoiceAward recognizes the wake-up service (Weckdienst) as best speech-enabled public phone service.

Award winners were selected by a panel of expert judges attending the recent VoiceDays conference (the German SpeechTek) in Wiesbaden. Judges looked not only for service usability, but also for the short development time and the cost-efficient realization.

The service can be accessed through the German service number 11864 (Deutsche Telekom) or 0900-500 11 55 (premium rate).

Welcome to the VoiceObjects Developer Blog. The VoiceObjects team is very excited about this new communication channel as this will enrich our growing developer community by sharing thoughts and experiences on various topics.

This weblog will focus on best practices for self-service application design, VUI / GUI design, analytics and reporting, and speech grammar development. Also we are going to cover new market and technology trends and how those impact the VoiceObjects product roadmap. Specifically on developments in the W3C standard bodies around VoiceXML. But also on emerging phone self-service channels such as Video, SMS, USSD, Web Chat and Instant Messaging. And finally we want to report about successful project and solution deployments with our SI partners and customers.

Here are the VoiceObjects team members who  will participate as authors in the Developer Blog:

Andreas Volmer – Presales Manager EMEA
Angelika Salmen – Manager VUI Services
Christopher Schick – Program Manager
Martin Mauelshagen – Program Manager
Michael Codini – CTO
Michael Gill – Director Product Management
Stefan Besling – VP Engineering
Tobias Göbel – Senior Presales Consultant
Volker Kraft – Manager Education Services

If you would like to stay  up-to-date  on what we are doing, please do subscribe to our site’s feed – and please do pass along your comments.  We’d love to hear from you.

The VoiceObjects team