Disruptive Telephony

Are you interested in how you can service customer requests across all the different communication channels they might use? Do you want to give your customers a choice in the way they interact with you? Rather than requiring them to call in to a customer service phone number, do you want to let them send you a text message? Or an IM? Or use Twitter?

If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I am giving tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 am US Eastern time titled "Unified Self-Service: Creating multi-channel communications apps using Voxeo tools". You can register for free.

I'll be talking about this concept we call "Unified Self-Service" where you can create a single application that interacts with customers across multiple communication channel (but not necessarily using the exact same user interface). It's a topic I blog about on Voxeo's site and mention in our various presentations.

Perhaps obviously to long-time readers, I have an interest in the "social" side of the communication, particularly as we talk about "Social CRM" and engaging with customers through social channels. You can naturally expect to hear me talk about that tomorrow as well.

Registration is free... and if you can't attend, the session will be archived for later viewing from our Developer Jam Session page (and if you register, we'll let you know when the archive is posted).

It's a fun topic... and I'm looking forward to the conversation we'll have tomorrow.

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As I mentioned in a post last month, I will be in Orlando, Florida, next week (June 21-23) at the Voxeo Customer Summit. We've got a great agenda of speakers, great attendance, some excellent partners demonstrating their solutions based on Voxeo platforms, a keynote by former hacker Kevin Mitnick and much more. Some great announcements coming up as well...

If you are interested in developing communications applications that work with voice, SMS/texting, IM/chat, mobile web and many other channels, the event will be a great place to learn about some of the leading offerings in the space. Registration is free.

During the event, I expect to be posting photos to my Flickr stream and tweeting to both @danyork and @voxeo. I'm sure I'll be posting to the Voxeo blog portal as well.

If you are coming to the Voxeo Customer Summit, I'll look forward to meeting you there!

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What is different in the upcoming VoiceXML 3 specification from the W3C? How will it help you create better communication applications? How can you get ready for VXML 3?

If you are curious about what the VoiceXML 3 effort is all about, Voxeo is hosting a free webinar tomorrow, Thursday, May 20, 2010, at 11 am US Eastern time where one of the co-chief editors of the specification, Dan Burnett, will talk about these questions and more.

Registration is free and you can register online. It should be a very informative session.

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Would you like to learn more about Voxeo, this crazy and cool company I work for? Would you like to learn about how you can build communications applications that go beyond voice and let you interact with customers via SMS/text, IM, Twitter, web and video? Would you like to meet Voxeo executives, partners and others in the industry?

As I wrote about over on the Voxeo Talks blog, you can do all that and MUCH more at the Voxeo Customer Summit 2010 at the amazing Hard Rock Hotel at Universal Orlando on June 21-23, 2010.

Note that the Summit is for anyone working with Voxeo services... so even if you just have a free developer account over on our Evolution developer portal (or are thinking about getting one), you are welcome to come down to Orlando to join in the fun.

On the Summit agenda, you'll see that we have:

• Sessions about the future of Voxeo and our roadmap
• Product spotlights highlighting what is new in each of our products
• Business sessions showing you how you can grow your business
• Technical deep dives to help you get the most out of our services
• Feedback sessions where we want to hear from you about what you want
• Demo sessions where you can see the latest software from Voxeo and several partners, talk with the actual engineers behind the products and learn in a live setting about the products
• Meals and social events including a performance by the Blue Man Group!

It will be an outstanding two days of learning, interaction and fun. The best part is...

REGISTRATION IS FREE!

That's right! In keeping with our free downloads and free developer accounts and free training, we decided to give you this "All Access" pass to get an inside view of Voxeo... for free! All you have to do is get yourself to Orlando, FL, and pay for your hotel, etc.

To find out more about the Customer Summit including discounts on staying at the Hard Rock Hotel, please visit our summit site at:

www.voxeo.com/summit2010/

It's a great time to visit Orlando and given that the Hard Rock Hotel is at Universal Studios you may want to stay a bit longer or bring your family along. Fans of Harry Potter will be delighted by the fact that the brand new Harry Potter ride opens up at Universal just 3 days before our Summit!

Space is filling up fast at the hotel, so please register as soon as possible and book your hotel room.

I'm looking forward to seeing many folks at Summit - we're excited to show you all the great new products and services we're launching and in learning about how we can help you grow your services and businesses.

See you in Orlando!

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As I mentioned previously, I spoke at the Voice Biometrics Conference in Jersey City, NJ. While there, I brought along my Nikon D90 DSLR and took a series of pictures of the speakers at VoiceBioCon. Click on the image below to go over to the set on Flickr:

The Hyatt Regency Jersey City turned out to be an incredible place to take pictures of Manhattan and the New York City area. The hotel is right on the river across from Manhattan. You could also see the Empire State Building down one direction... and the Statue of Liberty up in the other direction. The buildings in Jersey City were also quite amazing to shoot. Here is a set on Flickr of Manhattan and the Jersey City shore:

The conference itself was a great event... I'll be writing up some thoughts from the event soon.

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If any of you will be at the Voice Biometrics Conference next week (May 4-5) in the New York area (Jersey City, actually), I'll be there speaking on Wednesday about 'Seeding the Cloud - Authentication as a Service'. I'm arriving Monday evening and will be there through early Thursday morning.

"Voice Bio Con", as it is called, is a rather comprehensive gathering of the major players in the voice biometrics / voice authentication / voice verification space. Great agenda with some excellent speakers (and yeah, I'm on that list, too). I wrote over on the VOIPSA blog about the number of case studies and real world deployments that will be discussed.

It should be a great event... I'm on that panel and will also be talking about Voxeo's voice biometric partner program where you can try out voice biometric solutions for free using our hosted platform and the hosted services from four of the major voice biometric vendors. I'm looking forward to meeting up with some friends there and undoubtedly having some great conversations and learning a good bit.

If you are at the event, please do say hello! If you want to go and haven't registered yet, there's a discount code you can use to save $200.

See (some of) you in the Big Apple...

P.S. And yes, you can safely assume that I'll be tweeting (probably both @danyork and @voxeo) and blogging from the event...

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I've long been a fan of the work that Jay Phillips did to create the Adhearsion open source telephony framework and so I was delighted to read today of news of its future. To give some context, Jay first created Adhearsion a number of years back because he was frustrated with how hard it was to create dial plans with the open source Asterisk PBX. So Jay went off and created a framework where a programmer could use the Ruby programming language to very simply create voice applications.

Jay went on to team up with Jason Goecke to further develop Adhearsion and then last year Jay and Jason joined Voxeo (my employer) to create Voxeo Labs out in San Francisco. While Jay has since moved on, Jason continues to move Adhearsion forward and announced today that Adhearsion has a new home on Github ... and hinted at much greater plans in store. I'm looking forward to seeing what all they may be...

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What if you could have a single application that communicated with your customers not just through voice but also through SMS, IM/chat and even Twitter?

That's exactly what we announced at Voxeo today with our new Tropo.com release. Tropo is our "cloud communications platform" operated out of our Voxeo Labs team that is focused on reaching out to web developers using today's programming languages and APIs. We launched it back at eComm in March 2009 and have been steadily adding more capability to it over the last year. Today the "beta" label was officially peeled off of Tropo, new international phone numbers were added, international speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) were added in 7 languages, and a host of other features were added, too.

Naturally, though, my interest was drawn to the fact that one of the channels you can now communicate to customers with is....

Twitter!

I demonstrated this in a post on the Tropo blog, "How to Add Twitter Support to a Tropo.com App - Step by Step", where I hooked up the Twitter account @danweathertest to an existing Tropo sample app I had that retrieved weather info from Yahoo!Weather when given a US ZIP code. I tweaked the app a bit and wrote about the tweaking in "An Example of How to Make a Tropo App Respond Differently to Different Channels (including Twitter)".

The cool part is that when it was all done, that single application is reachable via any of these communication channels:

Voice:

+1 (407) 374-3994
Skype: +99000936 9991438833
SIP: sip:[email protected]
INum: +883510001814088

SMS: (407) 374-3994
Jabber IM: [email protected]
Twitter: danweathertest

You can try it out by calling any of those numbers or using SMS, IM or Twitter. To use Twitter, just send a @ message to the Twitter ID "danweathertest" like this:

@danweathertest 32801

In a few moments you'll get back a summary of current weather conditions in whatever ZIP code you send it. Now the app isn't perfect... it doesn't do much in the way of error-checking and as I mention in the second blog post, I need to work on it a bit more to get rid of the initial prompt if you send it a ZIP code. I don't honestly know what it will do if you send it a bogus ZIP code. It's just a simple demo app designed to get people thinking about what you can do with apps that plug in to Twitter.

Want to try out building some apps yourself? Just head over to www.tropo.com and sign up for a free developer account. You can look at the many sample apps or, if you know python, you're welcome to play with the code to my sample weather app. (And if you don't know python you're of course welcome to play with the code, too... ) Have fun with it... I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with. (And I'll be writing more about Twitter apps soon...)

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As I mentioned on a Voxeo blog yesterday, the good folks at TMC recently posted a video interview I did with them at ITEXPO back in January in Florida. In the interview, I discussed:

• the Cloud Communications Summit and pushing communications out into "the cloud"
• security issues related to cloud communications
• what's next in communications, including multi-channel communications (a component of what we refer to at Voxeo as Unified Self-Service)

Anyway, for folks who wonder what it is I do, part of it is telling stories in forms like this...

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Why shouldn't we be able to use our "voice" as a way to securely authenticate into systems? After all, it's one of the few "biometrics" that are unique to each of us... along with fingerprints, retina scans, etc. What about accuracy and "replay" attacks? After all, some of us remember "My voice is my password" from back in the movie Sneakers...

"Aren't voice biometrics hard to implement?" ... "Are they really secure?"

Today, over on Voxeo's blogs, we announced a new voice biometrics initiative with four partners designed to answer these questions and show developers exactly how easy it is to add voice biometrics to voice applications. (also called "voice verification" or "voice authentication", although those are both subsets of the larger "voice biometrics")

The idea is simple. Build a VoiceXML application in Voxeo's hosted cloud and then follow the instructions on the "How To" docs linked off of www.voxeo.com/biometrics to add voice biometrics to your application. You can use an existing VoiceXML application or you can create a new one. Code samples are available. (and it's free to create an account if you don't already have one.)

The beauty of it is that all of the services are out in the cloud... so it's very easy to simply try it out.

Please check out our announcement page to watch video interviews, read relevant blog posts and learn more about how you can get started today.

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