RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

There seems to be a lot of exciting stuff going on with open source projects and SIP lately. I attended a session at VON that covered some of the projects that are out there and I wanted to share some of my thoughts on them here.

The big news of course has been that PingTel is open-sourcing all their IP PBX software including their SIP stack and softphone. They plan to have all of their stuff up at sipfoundry.org on April 15th. Overall it looks like there should be some very interesting code that will be made available including some various media processing libraries and integration with the OpenVXI project.

The other open-source sip stack that looks interesting is reSIProcate. It’s a pretty new stack on the scene but seems to support some of the leading edge SIP drafts and features including TLS/SSL.

And of course you could not forget Asterisk the Linux PBX. Their booth at VON was full of people who wanted to take a look at how well it worked. I expect that more and more people are going to getting involved in this project as it really seems to be taking off.

On the Java side there seems to be a good amount of activity going on over at java.net. They are currently hosting a number of JAIN SIP open-source projects including a SIP location proxy server and various soft phones. Sadly on the RTP front there still has not been a lot of progress. The only real RTP solution is JMF and based on my own experience and from everyone that I have talked to it seems way too clunky and does not scale well at all. I really hope that sun gets something going here one way or another. If not I think it’s something that some open source project may want to take on.

I just finished moderating a panel at VON titled “Media Servers and SIP” and it was amazing to see the attendance. The room had at least 100 people attending and it was standing room only. Talking to the panelists they told me they were all shocked at the interest level in the room. They have done panels covering media servers in the past and this is the first time there was a good level of excitement in the room and by far the largest attendance.

As Jeff Pulver has said recently the turnout at VON this year is great. I spent most of the day yesterday at the show and it’s been great to see so many exhibitors out there on the floor and a lots of attendees. Sadly I was not able to make the conference party last night as I was loosing my voice and am just trying to finish recovering from a cold but I’m sure it was a complete blast.

The Voice Browser Working Group just released the first working draft of VoiceXML 2.1 today. This standardizes some of the common extensions that people have been adding to the 2.0 spec. Please direct comments to the W3C mailing list.

Here are a few links to some news articles about the VoiceXML 2.0 spec hitting Recommendation status:

• VoiceXML Forum
• Cover Pages
• Developer.com
• TechWeb

O’Reilly has a nice article up with a review of some of the speech features that are built into MacOS X.

Some of these technologies have been around since 1993 or so but there have been some nice updates and some cool new features. It’s been a long time since I have played around with them but I think I may just need to give them another try.

With Apple’s announcement of the new Spoken Interface that will enable applications to be easily entirely controlled via speech using the core Cocoa API’s that many MacOS X apps are built on it seems that Apple is really starting to invest R&D efferent into addressing Speech on the Desktop, especially how it applies for people with accessibility problems.

It’s finally happened. The W3C just send out a press release announcing that VoiceXML 2.0 and SRGS have hit Recommendation status.

The members of the Voice Browser Working Group have spent many years working to get to this point and it’s great to see it finally make it. Now the team can focus in on the specifications ahead. I know this will keep us busy for a long time.

Based on this InfoWorld article it looks like Deutsche Telekom is going to be joining the recent crowd of big name telcos in offering broadband VoIP to consumers. No date for release yet but it’s looking like VoIP is going to hit mass market in the next year or two at the most.

I just got back last night from a great week long meeting with the W3C’s Voice Browser Working Group. Overall I feel it was one of our better meetings and I for one am excited on the progress that was made both in my call control subgroup and in the main dialog sub group. I sadly can’t share the details of the meeting because they are W3C member confidential but I can say that you should see a number of exciting things in the weeks to come.

The speechsc group just published another draft of the MRCPv2 spec. It’s nice to see it moving along within the group so well. I am looking forward to seeing some vendors add support for it!

I took some pictures of our meetings this week so that people can see that we are actually doing real work. Enjoy!

Simeda has come out with a bit of software that allows you to add you to add custom background sounds to your cell phone conservations. You can now add traffic noise, construction sounds or even a circus parade to your calls. Next time you try to claim that you are sitting in your car when you are really at the beach this is the software to have!

While at dinner I snagged a few pictures at the Tech Plenary dinner party. Some of the folks saw me coming but others were caught unaware. Always fear a geek with a camera and a WiFi connection ;-)

I also grabbed a few more pictures from the sunrise this morning. I know these are the shots that everyone has been taking but the view is just so nice that I was unable to help myself.

Ken Rehor found this story on the front page of CNN.Com. This is funny on so many levels that it’s just hard to believe that this is for real.

This fails into the category of thing I had never thought of: This site searches out blogs automatically and renders them using TTS to a Internet radio station. They don’t have a lot of info on their website but it seems like if nothing else a unique idea.

The folks over at google labs have once again come up with a cool idea. They just announced Wireless Froogle a service to get price comparisons via WML from your mobile phone. Just point at your phone at http://wml.froogle.com to try it out. While I have seen other price comparison sites that seem to have more features then froogle I have not seen anyone add mobile access yet. Now they just need to add VoiceXML support ;-)

What happens when you leave a bunch of geeks unattended in a piano bar after a long day of meetings? You get band going of course. I hear the record companies are lining up to sign the new group ;-)

Hard to complain about life too much when you are meeting at a location as beautiful as Cannes. Enjoy these pictures from the meeting. Now off to start some real work with the CCXML meeting!