RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

The latest news today seems to be that Avaya is offering a “free” IP-PBX. In this case it’s not really free as much as they are offering 0% financing lease on their entry level PBX systems. Cute, even if it is somewhat misleading.

Anyway it’s interesting to see how some of the larger players are working to adapt to the new market where they can no longer sell phone systems that cost 5-6 figures out of the box for a basic starter system.

We certainly understand the value of making new technology easy to access to the small business. Thats why with Prophecy our premise IVR platform we have always offered free (really!) 2 port licenses that never expire and an easy up front pricing model for people who are looking to get started. Heck you can download set it up and buy it online in less then 10 minutes without ever having to talk to a person! Of course if you really want to talk to us we are always there 24×7 incase anything ever goes wrong.

When good VUI’s go wrong.

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…

Looks like a number of folks have started playing with Voxeo’s new Prophecy platform and have posted about it in their blogs. After working on this project for so long it’s nice to see people start using it and posting feedback about it:

• Meshify
• Moshe Yudkowsky
• Brian O’Connor
• James Webster

I was browsing the web last night looking at the status of the different open source CCXML interpreters and one thing I noticed is that I am not sure that people are aware of all of the options in this space:

On the asterisk side there is some work being done to connect CCXML to asterisk using jasterisk. jAsterisk is a set of java bindings for the asterisk open source PBX.

Another option is the oktopous ccxml project that is a C++ interpreter.

And last on my list is the CCXML4J project that is a CCXML interpreter written in the Java programming language.

If you are looking for a commercially supported CCXML platform Voxeo offers our VoiceCenter IVR platform that has full support for the CCXML specification. We also offer our CCXML Engine that is a C++ CCXML interpreter available to OEM’s on very flexible commercial licensing terms who want a commercially proven CCXML interpreter that has handled hundreds of millions of calls.

So for the afternoon I met up with Ken Rehor for lunch in Little Italy. Ken knew of a place there that he has gone to for the last 15 years or so and it was indeed very good. After that we headed to one of the pastry shops in the area and got some really good chocolate cannoli and espresso.

After pigging out we started our trek back to our respective hotels. Sadly at this point the rain started and we were having a hell of a time getting a taxi (at least I got good use out of my hat and coat!) . We decided we would just walk towards our hotels and see how it worked out. In the end we ended walking all the way (about 40 blocks) to Ken’s hotel and I hung out there for a while as my feet were killing me after walking all morning.

We spent an about an hour geeking and looking at pictures of antennas. Yes antennas…. He showed me telcodata.us and after playing around to see what kind of CO ran various phone numbers we saw a link to pictures of all the cell phone towers in Santa Cruz county! This entertained us in ways that normal people should never understand ;-)

After a while I decided to head back to my hotel and relax there for a bit. I had been hoping to get uptown to the museums but by this time they were all closed. That will be my first task for tomorrow!

As promised in yesterdays SpeechTek sessions here are copies of my presentations:

• Next Generation Platforms (pdf or html)
• CCXML (pdf)

Hope everyone enjoyed sessions!

This just in, the Asterisk PBX now has MacOSX Support! I will have to give this a try when I get back from the VoIP developers conference.

So I finally replaced my old Sony Ericsson T68i with a T637. My old phone had been randomly shutting itself off in the middle of calls and people had been complaining that they could not hear me.

The new phone is much nicer in many ways. It’s a much faster phone and the UI is a big step up. I am sad to lose the 900Mhz band for travel but I am not sure how big of a deal that is really going to be.

I was able to get this phone for only $50 as I had insurance on my old line so it was not a bad deal. I had really wanted a Treo but I could not bring myself to spend that much on a GSM phone that does not have bluetooth and EDGE support. Maybe next year…

Gordon Meyer just blogged about a Computer Telephony application for the mac called Phone Valet from Parliant. I have not had a chance to play with this yet but it looks like it might be a fun toy. Now if only it supported VoiceXML!

ComputerTelephony.org recently launched a new blog titled SpeechBlog that is going to be covering the telephony and speech space. Sadly there are not that many blogs covering the speech space yet but with any luck as the market is growing we should start to see a few more sources of conversation on the web.

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.

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!

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 ;-)

Today I am off to France for the W3C meeting. Tuesday will be the CCXML group’s face to face meeting and we hope to make some good progress on getting the Last Call Working Draft ready for public consumption.

I hope my battery lasts on the flight so I can finish up the giant list of editing that need to be done. I really should have flown on American instead of United as they are now offering power ports in most of the cheap seats. United only seems to be offering it in business and first class and I have been told at checkin that my chance of being upgraded is about the same as winning the lottery ;-)

It’s amazing the amount of small changes a spec like this needs before it gets published. I hope to be able to meet up with some of the other editors at the W3C meeting to see what tactics they use to manage a spec like this. Keeping track of all the changes from everyone ad getting everything merged cleanly is quite a task.

It looks like IBM is joining the growing list of companies that offer CCXML platforms.

Voxeo of course has supported CCXML from the very first working draft and has run millions and millions of calls on our platform as it’s been the core of our Voice Center for the last 3 years. We also support integration with several VoiceXML browsers.

A big congratulations are in order for Jeff Pulver and the rest of the Free World Dialup team. The FCC just approved(PDF) their petition that will help keep Voice over IP free of regulation in the US.

There has been a lot of talk in the industry on regulation of VoIP in the last few months. InfoWorld just had a story on this covering comments made by Jeffrey Citron the CEO of Vonage.

Jeff Pulver has covered this many times and his Petition for his Free World Dialup network is going to be reviewed by the FCC on February 12th.

These next few months are going to be very interesting as the regulation of this gets sorted out.