RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

You can read the full announcement at Voxeo’s press section of our website:

Voxeo Corporation, the leading provider of standards-based VoiceXML and CCXML IVR platforms and IVR hosting, announced today that it achieved profitability in 2004, thanks to record revenue growth, including the strongest fourth quarter performance in the company’s history. During the fourth quarter alone, Voxeo expanded customer acquisition by 16%, increased revenues by 30.9%, and boosted revenue from sales of premise-based systems by 340%. Voxeo revenues in 2004 nearly doubled over the prior year.

“Voxeo - thanks to the dedication of our employees and the sustained growth of our customers and partners - is proud to be one of the first companies in our industry to achieve ongoing, profitable operations,” said Jonathan Taylor, President and CEO of Voxeo. “With the success of 2004 behind us, Voxeo is investing in new products and projects that will further our lead in customer service, network quality, and feature flexibility. In combination, we expect these efforts will further accelerate our growth through 2005.”

By policy, Voxeo does not disclose the names of its enterprise customers. However, in 2004 Voxeo won, directly and through its channel partners, the following high-profile customers:

* Four of the five largest health insurance and HMO organizations in the U.S.
* One of the largest cargo shipping companies in the world
* One of the largest Internet Service Providers in the U.S.
* One of the largest soft drink distributors in the U.S.
* One of the largest management consulting companies in the world
* One of the largest package shipping companies in the U.S.
* One of the major U.S. television networks
* One of the largest film studios in U.S.
* One of the largest supermarket chains in the U.S.
* One of the largest automotive parts manufacturers in the world
* Both major U.S. political parties
* One of the branches of the U.S. Armed Forces

Voxeo also won business in 2004 from a large variety of innovative and successful small, medium, and startup enterprises through its Voxeo Evolution IVR Developer program. To date, over 11,000 developers have used the Evolution program to quickly create and deploy more than 25,000 applications on the traditional and SIP IVR Voxeo VoiceCenter platform.

Voxeo’s strong fourth quarter follows an employee- and management-led buyout, concluded on September 30, 2004. The new management-owned company enters 2005 as a cash-flow positive, profitable, rapidly growing business with no foreseen need for future equity financing.

The Boston Globe has an article about the challenges that TellMe and Verizon have had with their automated directory assistance system. Many of the problems listed have more to do with the underlying speech recognition system then the actual application as doing such large scale grammars is still very leading edge technology. Anyway, it’s a decent read to get an idea of what sort of problems you may run into when deploying speech applications with extremely large grammars.

As announced on the W3C front page and news page, the Voice Browser Working Group just released an updated version of the CCXML specification as a second Last Call Working Draft! This update addresses a number of the comments that came in during the last review period and should be a really solid release.

The working group is currently hard at work defining the the implementation report assertions and tests and we plan to be able to move forward toward Candidate Recommendation in the next few months!

Richard Sprague from Microsoft has a nice listing of the current options for TTS on the market right now incuding some hints that Microsoft is working torwards putting something better then the “awful Microsoft Sam” voice that you currently get.