RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

Meet Emily, the Nice Evil Robot

When good VUI’s go wrong.

Eric Hernaez over at The Third Screen just came across rocketsource. If you have not seen his blog you should take a look. It covers some good stuff on the Telco 2.0 vision.

David Kang recently write a great tutorial on using SAP and Prophecy over on the SAP developer network. Anyone who is looking at getting started with VoiceXML on the SAP platform may want to take a look as it gives a good overview to getting up and running.

As promised here is a zipped up copy of the full day CCXML 1.0 tutorial that I ran with Mark Scott and Rachel Muller last week at speechtek. Please enjoy and if you have any questions please feel free to drop me a line.

Ahh, SpeechTek day one. The fun of early keynotes, booth setup, meetings and all around fun ;-) Guess I had better get moving and pick up my badge so I can make the keynote… See you guys around the floor.

CellTell.tv recently created a nice Telephony 2.0 application that shows exactly what I have been talking about with regards to where we need to be going in the telephony world.

Celltell.tv is a phone interface to the popular backpack web service from 37 signals. In case you have not heard of backback it is a very nice web based personal organization program. It manages todo lists, calendars, notes and just about anything else using a very simple web interface and has some great hooks into e-mail and a open developer API for extending it.

What CellTell has done is added way to create voice notes for your pages simply by placing a phone call to a VoiceXML application. When you call in and leave a message the recording is automatically uploaded to the backpack service allowing you to listen to the content when you are back at the computer. They support accessing it via toll free numbers, local numbers both in the US and the UK and skype.

This is just another of the ten’s of thousands of applications that have been created on Voxeo’s Evolution developer program. Anyone want to guess as to if we would have seen this service if people had to write low level C code modules instead of simple XML to make this work? Think of what the world would be like if you had to write an apache module for every web application! mod_rjauburncom anyone? ;-)

Voxeo will be at Speechtek next week in New York City. A number of us will be speaking on different panels and sessions. If you want to catch us drop by one of the following:

• I will be co-hosting a day-long tutorial on CCXML (Thurs Aug 10, 8:30a-4:30p).
• I will also be presenting in the Open Source Summit (Tues Aug 8, 11a-12:30p).
• Voxeo will be on a panel entitled “Strategic and Management Insights: Hosted Speech: Is it Right for You?” (Thurs Aug 8, 2:00p-3:30p).
• Marketing VP John Hibel will speak at the VOX conference on “What To Feed the 80 Pound Gorillas: Strategies for SMEs” (Mon Aug 7, 3:15p–4:00p).
• Voxeo VP and VoiceReady founder John Amein will be hosting a workshop on the Evolution Designer application development and management tool (Tues Aug 8, 3:00p-4:00p).

If you can’t make any of the above sessions make sure to stop by booth 705 and say hi. Rumor has it we will have something cool to give away again this year ;-)

You have got to check out this great phone application created by one of the developers on Voxeo’s evolution developer site. It’s a cute little app that people call to make mad lib style poems.

This is the exact kind of thing I was talking about yesterday at cluecon. When people start being to make really simple phone applications without knowing low level telephony you are going to see a lot more web type content out there. This is a great example of what Telephony 2.0 needs to look like.

Here is a copy of my presentation from cluecon about telephony 2.0…

We just got a mailing list setup for rocketsource.org. To subscribe just send a mail to rocketsource-subscribe@rocketsource.org. We also have an list archive setup so you can search prior postings (still not much up yet but that should change soon).

Yesterday we (Voxeo) were finally able to announce our rocketsource.org project. This is going to be an umbrella project to help develop, promote and sponsor open source phone applications. To date this has been a giant weakness as there are very few complete applications available that people can just download and start using.

So far we have released 3 applications that are complete and ready to go. We have Voice Conference Manager from Moshe Yudkowsky. And then we have Vox-Attendent and Vox-Mail from Shawn Rhoads.

We are planning on sponsoring more applications over the coming months. If you have something you would like to contribute to or sponsor please drop us a line at cosmonauts@rocketsource.org.