Posts Tagged ‘voxeo’

AdhearsionCon registration opens, Web telephony developers take note

I know what you’re saying: Adhear-what?

AdhearsionCon. Now open for registration.

Developing telephony apps these days has never been easier. Programmers have a variety of languages to choose from, several frameworks and APIs to refer to, and none of them cost much (or at all). Better yet, the inevitable convergence of telephony and Web has brought us innovative mashups and, in my view more importantly, a new generation of telephony and voice app developers. These developers are well-versed in Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc., savvy with third-party APIs, and immensely comfortable with Web technologies.

You may have heard of Twilio, Tropo, Teleku, QuickFuse, and the like. You definitely know about Skype, Asterisk, and Google Voice. And perhaps a bit curious about SIP. Not many folks have heard of Adhearsion (myself included), but it’s definitely something worth digging into.

For starters, Adhearsion is a framework written in Ruby to help developers code voice apps for the open source PBX, Asterisk. Why Ruby? Why Asterisk? (Check the FAQ, jack.)

It’s also open sourced and backed by one of the biggest names in cloud-based voice app development, Voxeo.

I would encourage any developer — Web or voice or anything else — to check it out, especially if you’re in the Bay Area. After all, I believe the world is a better place with you knowing how to bend open source telephony to your will.

Hacker extraordinaire Kevin Mitnick to speak at Voxeo Customer Summit

Voxeo managed to invite world famous ex-hacker Kevin Mitnick to speak at its Customer Summit taking place in next month. What will he talk about? Security (or lack thereof), of course!

The company continues to put out some intriguing announcements about products and events… Being able to hear Mitnick in person definitely makes me want to check out the summit.

Teleku joins Tropo and Twilio in competitive Web telephony

The Web telephony space welcomes another competitor today: Teleku (a project of GetVocal, Inc.). For all you Web developers in search of telephony APIs, rejoice! for you have another set of programming goodies to choose from.

Why Teleku over competitors Tropo and Twilio? According to this TechCrunch piece:

So how does Teleku differ from Twilio? It’s a matter of flexibility, according to founder (and sole employee) Chris Matthieu. He says that when you use Twilio, it’s an all-in-one deal: you write your code in Twilo’s easy-to-use syntax called TwiML, which is then sent to Twilio’s telephony services in the cloud that are hosted on AWS. That’s great (and may be even preferable to some people), but with Twilio you can’t port your application to a cheaper service should one become available.

With Teleku, you can write your code using TwiML, or you can use Teleku’s own simplified telephony scripting language, called PhoneML. Your code is then sent to Teleku’s servers, which translate it into industry standard (but harder to write) VoiceXML. Matthieu says you can use that code on any of a variety of established telephony providers, including Voxeo and Plum Voice, and it will also work with enterprise systems that rely on VoiceXML.

Matthieu says this gives Teleku users a few advantages: first, they can swap between various providers if they find a better rate. And he also says that Voxeo and other telecom services have better optimized their servers than AWS has to work with voice traffic, and that they offer a few features that Twilio doesn’t yet, like speech recognition.

Finally, Teleku offers a wizard for building web-enabled telephony services for people who don’t have any coding experience at all. This allows you to select actions from a dropdown menu, like “Play”, “Speak”, and “Transfer” (you then fill in text dialogs to instruct the application what to say or what number to transfer to). You can drag and drop these actions depending on what order you’d like to execute each action. Watch the video below for a complete demo of the wizard.

Sounds like a good combination of features and user experience. VoiceXML is certainly the industry standard and would be a plus to developers who’d want portable applications. The behind-the-curtain star is certainly Voxeo, for providing the platform and speech recognition feature. But no doubt Matthieu did a tremendous job in designing PhoneML and the user-friendly online tool for making it work seamlessly.

And judging by the fact that founder/developer Matthieu tweeted last at 2:30am and got TechCrunched, he’s probably having a very busy day…

Voxeo partners with key voice biometrics providers

Seeing a market demand in voice verification and authentication Voxeo today announced new partnerships with four major voice biometrics providers: CSIdentity, PerSay, TradeHarbor, and Vocalect. All solutions are said to work in both a hosted or on-premise architecture. With speech recognition technology maturing I do see voice verification and authentication as the next (current?) frontier in advanced voice applications. Instead of keying in long strings of digits or saying a sequence of numbers, who wouldn’t want to just repeat a passphrase to get authenticated? Definitely cuts down on the IVR navigation time and that in itself will be a welcomed improvement to callers.

Here is the official press release:

Orlando, FL-February 9, 2010 — Today Voxeo, the leading provider of Unlocked Communications, announced partnerships with four leading voice biometrics providers: CSIdentity, PerSay, TradeHarbor and Vocalect. Existing and prospective Voxeo customers can now easily try, test and deploy voice biometrics as part of existing or new applications on Voxeo’s network.

Voice authentication makes it possible for companies to provide the security of voice biometrics to verify and protect customer transactions. A person’s voice is as unique as a fingerprint. Enterprises, financial institutions, government agencies, healthcare and insurance providers, telecommunications and service providers all look to enable voice biometrics to take advantage of the added security at a time of increasing identity theft and fraud. Customers appreciate the ease of use, avoiding long or difficult to remember pin numbers or easily penetrated security questions.

“A growing number of IT and customer care professionals have indicated that voice authentication implementations are on their roadmap for 2010,” said Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research. “An ‘on-demand’ approach, like Voxeo’s, provides the combination of flexibility, reliability and cost-effectiveness that the marketplace requires during this phase of development and deployment.”

Voxeo enables companies of all sizes to develop and deploy IVR and VoIP systems, and with today’s announcement offers verification and other voice biometric solutions for every industry, geography, and scenario.   Voxeo and its voice biometrics partners have facilitated an easy-to-use trial process through Voxeo’s Prophecy Hosting and Prophecy On-Premise platforms. Partners include:

CSIdentity‘s VoiceVerified® provides unique value to businesses and consumers, as it is the only voice biometric solution with an integrated identity verification and authentication platform. The multi-factor authentication system allows organizations to reliably verify and authenticate an individual’s identity before enrolling their voice print. CSIdentity’s VoiceVerified solution supports Red Flag and HIPAA compliance while simultaneously combating fraud and enabling businesses to enhance the customer experience and security while reducing average time per call. CSIdentity VoiceVerified offers solutions for securing online data, call center transactions or mobile commerce connections.

PerSay‘s voice biometrics products are based on 14 consecutive years of research and development, originally targeting military and intelligence applications. PerSay’s state of the art algorithmic engines and its unique and easily deployed platform are the infrastructure of its VocalPassword™ and FreeSpeech™ products. These products enable verification of customers as well as identification of fraudsters and are the underlying infrastructure of the world’s largest customer facing text dependent and text independent voice biometrics deployments – successfully automating and securing millions of transactions a year. PerSay’s customers include: Bell Canada, British Telecom, Vodafone Turkey, Bank Leumi, Bank Hapoalim, Discount Bank, Philippines Government Insurance Services as well as US Immigration Control and Enforcement among others. Multiple US-based banks and credit card companies and government agencies around the world are currently piloting PerSay’s products.

TradeHarbor‘s Voice Signature ServiceSM uses a person’s voice as their unique identifier, enabling real-time authentication and authorization of telephone and Internet transactions anywhere in the world. The Voice Signature ServiceSM can be added to existing VoiceXML applications with simple sub-dialog calls or added to web pages or applications using simple server-side scripts.  TradeHarbor’s service can be used to provide protection against identity theft, protected access to financial information, secure login for remote workers, secure mobile devices and payments, automated authentication and increased call center operator efficiency, protection for personal health information and increased customer satisfaction.

Vocalect‘s team has over three years of proven experience operating voice authentication services via a seamless integration with the Voxeo platform. Vocalect’s next generation voice biometric engine is text and language independent and supports static pass-phrases, numbers, and natural speech – giving customers maximum flexibility.  And, Vocalect’s simple VoiceXML API allows dialog designers to quickly and easily integrate enrollment and verification functions into their Prophecy applications – without the need for advanced programming skills.  Vocalect has customers in the financial services, real estate, law enforcement, and online educations industries.

“One of the barriers to adoption of voice biometrics technology has simply been the difficulty of trying and deploying the technology cost-effectively.  We are working with all the leading biometrics companies using our free developer hosting and free downloads to make it easier for all developers and enterprises to discover the value the technology can bring them,” said John Amein, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, Voxeo Corporation. “I am confident that many of Voxeo’s 100,000 developers will find creative ways to apply the technology and deliver a new generation of valuable communication applications.”

To find the best voice biometrics solution for your company please visit: http://www.voxeo.com/biometrics where you can find more information about these partners and also instructions for how you can easily try these voice biometric solutions with your existing VoiceXML and IVR applications.

About Voxeo

Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 100,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web at www.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com, or twitter.com/voxeo.

Voxeo Media Contact

Megan Maxwell
Voxeo Corporation
Phone: +1 (407) 455-5848
megan@voxeo.com

Voxeo does more shopping

Orlando-based Voxeo is putting that $9 million investment in November 2009 to good use in 2010: acquiring ClackPoint. As the press release points out:

ClackPoint is Voxeo’s eighth acquisition in the last two years. The acquisition builds on Voxeo’s strategy to enable Unified Self-Service and Unified Communications applications across voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM and the mobile web, and aligns with Voxeo’s May 2009 acquisition of IMified, the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform.

Voxeo will continue to enhance and deliver the ClackPoint service. Voxeo will also release new products and services based on ClackPoint technology in 2010. To learn how to use ClackpPoint for free or to embed ClackPoint conferencing in any website, mashup, or application including Google Wave just visit the ClackPoint FAQ.

Eighth acquisition! No other IVR company has been on a buying spree like Voxeo. Maybe Cisco comes close?