RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

10/30/2007

Why I hate making “normal” enterprise software

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 5:25 pm

This posting on crappy enterprise software outlines so much of why I hate the status-quo and why when we started work on Prophecy that our goal was to make it as easy to use as shrink wrap software. It’s not that you would ever go into bestbuy and pick up an IVR platform but for the love of god it should not ship on 8 CD’s and require an expert to show up on your doorstep for a week to get it up and running.

Now while I think we have done a pretty good job in making Prophecy the easiest IVR platform on the market we think there is a lot more that can be done in the space. One of the mantra’s around our office is “how could we make this easer?”. It’s the question we try to ask ourself time and time again as we try to reach closer to our goal of killing off the quacking cow.

8/7/2006

SpeechTek day 1

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 4:03 am

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.

8/4/2006

SpeechTek East 2006

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 4:52 pm

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 ;-)

8/3/2006

ClueCon Presentation

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 1:12 pm

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

8/2/2006

Rocket Source

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 1:09 pm

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.

2/1/2006

Voxeo’s vision of speech…

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 1:23 pm

This is a presentation I gave at SpeechTek West yesterday with my vision of what is wrong with speech today and what I think needs to change.

Updated: Fixed the link to the PDF

Bloging about Prophecy

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 8:31 am

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:

1/30/2006

Prophecy Press

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 8:01 am

It looks like the press has started writing about Prophecy. Robert Poe from VoIP Magazine seems to be the first one to release an article to the public:

* Voxeo Brings Cheap Voice Response into the Enterprise

8/3/2005

What a Week

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 5:15 pm

Wow, what a week! This was a great year for us at SpeechTek. Our booth was kept very full with customer and partner meetings and everyone wanted the Vespa that we were giving away ;-) Of course the first comment out of most people was “Wow! My (wife|husband) would KILL me! I want it!”

The poker game we had with a few partners and customers at the W Times Square was a blast and kept me up WAY too late last night. I only hope the students in my class this morning did not notice my lack of sleep. All I can say is thank god I don’t drink otherwise I would have really been in trouble ;-)

Tomorrow I am going to be in a W3C CCXML face to face meeting all day as we continue to move CCXML to the Candidate Recommendation stage. I am torn between getting a bunch of prep work for the meeting done tonight and being a$$ tired in the morning or going to bed early and being fully rested… I think I might take the sleep this time around.

SpeechTek Presentations

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 5:03 pm

As I promised in my sessions this week here are copies of all the presentations that I have given at SpeechTek this week:

Monday:

1PM-5PM - Telephony Meets the Web - pdf - powerpoint

Wednesday:

10AM-12PM - Speech Applications, Languages and Techniques - pdf
1PM-3PM - Latest Languages for Developing Speech Applications -
pdf

8/1/2005

Good Morning SpeechTek!

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 3:27 am

Well it’s monday morning and SpeechTek is just about to get underway. This is going to be by far my busiest year ever here at SpeechTek as I am presenting at 4 sessions this week. My CEO Jonathan Tayor is also going to be presenting at two sessions this year. You can the full list of what we are doing this week in our announcement.

We also announced VoiceCenter 6 today with tons of new features and capabilities including MRCP, CCXML 1.0 (Last call working draft) SIP Server Support, fully VoiceXML 2.0 certified and VoiceXML 2.1 Extensions, CallXML 3.0 and a Dialogic Card based SIP Gateway. This release has been long in the making and it’s great to finally get that out to the world. A big thanks goes out to all the guys on the engineering team that have spent many long nights to make this possible.

Oh ya, and in case you missed it we had a kick ass quarter making this 6 in a row now that we have been profitable.

Anyway, I hope to see some of you folks today at my “Telephony Meets the Web” session from 1:00 pm - 5:30 pm or at the “Hosting Services for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises” session from 3:15 pm - 4:00 pm (yes, I am double booked but my co-presenters in the half day session will be helping me here here).

7/11/2005

SpeechTek

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 6:27 pm

This year looks to be a big year for Voxeo at SpeechTEK New York. We will have a booth this time around (#711) and I hear some rumors that we are going to have some very cool giveaways for visitors (Not another iPod, while cool they are so last year).

I also will be speaking during a number of different sessions this year. So far my schedule looks like:

Monday 1:00 pm - 5:30 pm - Creating and Deploying the Next Generation of Speech Apps - Telephony Meets the Web
Monday 3:15 pm - 4:00 pm - Hosting Services for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
Wednesday 10:00 am - 12:00 pm - Speech Applications, Languages and Techniques
Wednesday 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm - Latest Languages for Developing Speech Applications

Another Speech Blog…

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 6:13 pm

Seems like there are more and more blogs covering speech now adays. Anyway, I ran across the spkydog koop the other day and it seems to have some good coverage of speech and multi-modal standards. I would definitely recommend checking it out.

7/8/2005

Speech and IVR Blogs

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 3:59 am

I recently came across a few new blogs on the net relating to speech and IVR. VoIP Soup seems to have just started the other day but looks to be promising. Voice Technologies in Government also looks to have a lot of useful information on it.

1/26/2005

Voxeo Announces Profitable 2004

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 11:39 am

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.

1/25/2005

Directory Assistance Challenges

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 6:27 pm

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.

1/14/2005

Updated CCXML Last Call Working Draft

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 12:10 pm

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!

10/25/2004

Great TTS Demo Link

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 3:37 pm

Today I came across an amusing TTS demo on the Rhetorical web site. It’s a demo of their Eduardo and Valley Girl voices in conversation. You will have to check it out. The Rhetorical guys have a great sense of humor and make some pretty damn good text to speech voices.

9/22/2004

Best SpeechTek moment from SpeechUp

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 7:37 pm

“Best moment” from SpeechTek from the folks at the SpeechUp Blog:

—-
Microsoft presenter showed the MSS & SASDK during the tools demo session. Each vendor had ten minutes to present their tool. After his presentation there were exactly two questions:

1. Does it support VoiceXML?

2. Will it support VoiceXML in the future?
—-

I personaly find this very amusing. I only wish I was there to listen to the Microsoft reponses to these two questions ;-)

9/17/2004

Presentations from SpeechTek

Filed under: — RJ Auburn @ 3:12 pm

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

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

Hope everyone enjoyed sessions!

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