http://tools.ietf.org/tools/idspell/idspell.pyht

All you do is upload a text version of your I-D and… ta da… it goes through and checks the spelling in your draft. What’s great about Idspell versus the standard spell-checker in any editor, is that it has been preloaded with IETF-specific info. On the IETF Tools page it says:

Idspell uses an IETF-specific wordlist built from the last 2 years’ published RFCs, surnames of recent I-D authors and some manually added words.

It’s just one of many tools that have been made available to help authors more easily create Internet-Drafts. Very useful!

P.S. For those curious to see the latest version of the P2PSIP security overview Internet-Draft, I’m trying an experiment in using Github as a repository for my I-Ds. You can find them there at http://github.com/danyork/internet-drafts-york/tree/master

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Technorati Tags: IETF, standards, Internet-Drafts

You can download or play the podcast here (in Quicktime):
[display_podcast]

Alternatively, you can watch on YouTube at:

If you enjoyed this show, please consider one (or more) of these options:

• subscribing via iTunes
• subscribing to our YouTube account (if you are a YouTube user)
• subscribing to our RSS feed
• following us on Twitter

• following us on FriendFeed

Thank you.

This Voxeo podcast can be found on the web at http://blogs.voxeo.com/ett. If you have comments or feedback about this show, you can either leave comments here on the show blog site or email Dan York.

Technorati Tags: dan york, danyork, emerging communications, emerging tech talk, emerging technology, emergingtechtalk, ett, voxeo, imified, im, self-service, bots, automation, messaging, twitter, customer service

Of course it is, but the fact is that your provider doesn’t want you going anywhere. To accomplish this, many vendors bundle proprietary tools that make it difficult to switch solutions should your requirements change down the road. Even standards-touting VoiceXML providers often use proprietary call control and VoiceXML tags to cleverly move lock-in from the platform level to the application level.

At Voxeo, we keep our customers by providing them with a better product and better support - never by locking them in. Voxeo offers the only VoiceXML browser to pass 100% of the VoiceXML Forum’s compliance test suite, including all optional tests, and the world’s most deployed CCXML browser. We support all of the secondary W3C voice standards and more SIP capabilities than any other vendor. Equally important, Voxeo strictly adheres to the principles behind open standards. The result is greater choice, unmatched flexibility, lower costs and true portability.

Since Voxeo’s customers own their intellectual property, they can switch providers, engage different development resources, or change their deployment model if requirements change.

With Voxeo you are free to:

• Move from hosting to a premise or hybrid deployment (or the other way around)
• Use your application development partner or VoiceXML development tool of choice
• Leverage the Voxeo VoiceObjects service creation environment to “design once and deploy anywhere.” VoiceObjects applications seamlessly work across all leading VoiceXML platforms and across multiple channels, including voice, IM, SMS and the mobile web. These phone channels can share the underlying dialog flow definition, business logic and back-end access, drastically simplifying development, maintenance, and reporting.
• Use your speech vendor of choice; Voxeo offers free built-in speech recognition and synthesis, as well as support for any MRCP-compliant engine
• Choose from a variety of TDM and VoIP carriers
• Run your application on any standards-compliant platform, including those of our competitors

If you are interested in learning more about Voxeo and our standards-based platform, contact us today.

Unfortunately, with everything else going on in my life (new job role here at Voxeo, new child, etc.), I am not planning to travel there to be in the face-to-face meetings. Once again, I’ll be participating remotely via streaming audio and Jabber chat rooms… although the 6 hours time difference from US Eastern will definitely prove to be a bit challenging.

I expect I won’t be alone in being remote, especially given current economic times and travel budgets within the industry in general. Hopefully the IETF will make available the “HTML-ized” agenda like the one available for IETF 74 - http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/74/ - that so nicely brought together all the links to relevant Internet drafts, Jabber rooms, etc. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, if you are going to Stockholm, I wish you all the best for your travel. I’ve never been to Stockholm but the pictures on the http://www.ietf75.se/ site and links from there do make it look intriguing to visit.

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Technorati Tags: IETF, standards, stockholm

Shortly after we announced the acquisition of IMified, independent developer Mark Headd let us know he was excited to give it a try for some of the “open government” projects he works on and documents on his VOX POPULI blog. On June 18th, he put up a great example: Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API where you can simply send a Jabber/GoogleTalk IM message to:

opensenate@bot.im

with a New York Senate bill number in it and get back the status of that bill.

When we added Twitter support to IMified last week, Mark quickly added a Twitter ID to his service so that now you can simply send a Twitter “@” message to “@opensenate” with the same kind of request. You can see some of the interaction so far on the twitter.com/opensenate page.

Mark has nicely made available in his blog post the sample PHP code for his IMified bot. Mark has also been exchanging comments with Nathan Freitas from the New York Senate CIO team. It’s very cool to see that Mark was the very first external user of the NY Senate API. (Congrats, Mark!)

It’s all great work and we’re pleased to see what Mark has done with the platform.

Two other comments:

1. I was not personally aware of this NY Senate openness initiative, but from this article, “5 Open tenets of the new NYSenate.gov“, it sounds like some excellent work. (Note to NH state gov’t: can I get access like this, too, please?)

2. How great is it to have the NY Senate CIO office posting their open source code and API documentation on Github! Great to see.

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Technorati Tags: ny, nysenate, open, open government, government, voxeo, imified

If you subscribe to industry newsletters and frequent industry websites, you may have noticed an increased number of webinars and whitepapers on Outbound Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The recent flurry of activity isn’t surprising given analyst forecasts. For example, Datamonitor predicts the market for hosted Outbound IVR services in North America alone will more than double from an estimated $213 million in 2008 to $524 million by 2013.

Outbound IVR offers companies the ability to provide proactive customer service, deliver important notifications, expedite collections and more. But to truly put the advantages of this technology to work for you, it is important to understand the intricacies of successful outbound calling, how it differs from your Inbound IVR solutions, and the importance of delivering a cohesive customer experience.

At Voxeo, Outbound IVR is old hat. A large portion of our hosting business can be attributed to customers with high-volume outbound traffic. In fact, last month a Voxeo hosted customer made 1.3 million outbound phone calls in 1.5 hours. In our latest whitepaper, “The Ins and Outs of Outbound IVR,” we set out to share some of the knowledge we’ve gathered over the last ten years, including a few gotchas to be aware of, as well as success factors that will make your campaigns better and your customers happier.

Read Voxeo’s new Outbound IVR whitepaper now. You can also learn more about our Outbound IVR capabilities, including how to get started for free at www.voxeo.com/outboundivr

What is the best Twitter plugin for WordPress MU for simply publishing tweets when new blog posts are published? Or for WordPress in general?

It’s a question I’ve been mulling over a lot recently as I’ve been looking at:

1. Reducing the number of tweaks I have to make to WordPress plugins on this site; and

2. Linking other company WordPress sites into our Voxeo twitter stream.

Back in December 2007, when I first linked this blog site to our Twitter stream, I wound up using Alex King’s great Twitter Tools plugin (see also here). The challenge, though, is this:

I had to hack the plugin code to make it work for us.

THE PROBLEM

Specifically, I went into the code to remove the “New blog post:” that gets added as a prefix to any new message going out to Twitter. This is difficult to do by design, as Alex states in his plugin FAQ:

Is there any way to change the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix when my new posts get tweeted?

Yes there is, but you have to change the code in the plugin file.

The reason this is done this way, and not as an easily changeable option from the admin screen, is so that the plugin correctly identifies the tweets that originated from previous blog posts when creating the digest posts, displaying the latest tweet, displaying sidebar tweets, and creating blog posts from tweets (you don’t want tweets that are blog post notifications being treated like tweets that originated on Twitter).

Can I remove the ‘New Blog Post:’ prefix entirely?

No, this is not a good idea. Twitter Tools needs to be able to look at the beginning of the tweet and identify if it’s a notification from your blog or not. Otherwise, Twitter Tools and Twitter could keep passing the blog posts and resulting tweets back and forth resulting in the ’spinning fireball of death’ mentioned above.

I have, of course, removed the prefix entirely. And now the problem is that whenever I need to upgrade the plugin, I have to remember to make this modification. Not good.

The issue is that there is a basic fundamental disconnect between the purpose of the Twitter Tools plugin and what I want to do.

The Twitter Tools plugin allows you not only to publish Twitter messages when you have a new blog post, but also perhaps more importantly to publish a blog post aggregating all your Twitter messages. So at some interval you have a new blog post that contains all your recent tweets. While I can see this being tremendously useful in some cases, and is honestly something I’ve been thinking about for my own personal blog, the truth is that for the Voxeo blog portal…

I don’t care!

All I really want out of the Twitter plugin is to publish a tweet whenever we publish a new blog post. I want the one-way push. And that is not where the power lies in the Twitter Tools plugin.

The challenge now in mid-2009 is that it seems like every developer, their brothers, sisters, parents, aunts and uncles have made a Twitter plugin for WordPress - there’s a zillion of them!

A SOLUTION?

So far, in the limited time I’ve had to research this, the plugin that has caught my eye is “Twitter Publisher” by Timan Rebel. It does precisely what it is says… very simply publishes a tweet any time you post a blog post. It does have the ability to add a tweet prefix, but that is blank by default. It also nicely has the ability to use either the bit.ly or awe.sm URL shortening service, which lets me tie the shortened URLs into my bit.ly account for tracking purposes.

I’ve installed this over on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal, which is currently a standalone WordPress (not WPMU) site, and so tweets now appear in our main Twitter stream when blog posts are published there. So far it seems to be working fine, although a couple of times I have been puzzled by how it has abbreviated the blog post title. For instance, here, pointing to this blog post, the post title is:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adapt to you

yet it was shortened to:

Adapt-to-me, as I don’t want to adap…

which seems strange as it didn’t seem to need to be shortened like that.

Outside of that, it’s been working well so far. I’m intrigued to try out the capability to also send a message to an author’s Twitter account based on including an author’s Twitter name in his/her profile.

MOVING AHEAD

Part of my reason for writing this post is to find out what plugins others have found useful for one-way publishing to Twitter. I have two steps I need to take:

1. Add a Twitter plugin to blog.imified.com so that posts there automatically appear in our main Twitter stream (Added challenge there: ideally we would like tweets to appear in both @voxeo and @imified)

2. Replace the Twitter plugin I use here at blogs.voxeo.com in our WordPress MU installation so that I can remove one post-plugin-upgrade tweak I have to make.

The one challenge with Twitter Publisher is that it’s not 100% clear that it will work with WordPress MU, although I’ve generally found most WP plugins to work well with WPMU.

So I throw the question out there… what Twitter plugins for WordPress MU (or WordPress) have you found work the best for updating your Twitter stream whenever you publish a new blog post?

(Thanks in advance)

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wpmu, wordpressmu, twitter, plugins

1. Register a Twitter name with Twitter
2. Add the Twitter name to your bot configuration (and go through the Twitter OAuth process)
3. Start receiving and generating messages to and from Twitter

That’s it.

Everytime someone sends a “@” message or a direct message (DM) to your Twitter account, the contents of that tweet will be sent to your application. Your app can reply back with more information, or really do anything else with that data.

Why might you want to do this? As we said in the news release:

As the volume of a company’s Twitter messages grows, an application on the IMified platform can scan incoming tweets and reply back as appropriate based on information in the message, speeding up the response time and allowing company staff to focus on more detailed inquiries. As another example, companies using Twitter as a customer service channel can create an application that will respond to Twitter inquiries late at night when customer service staff are not available. Similarly an application could scan messages and alert staff via IM or other channels when certain Twitter users contact the company or certain keywords appear in tweets.

“Think of all the typical information you gather at the beginning of a customer service interaction like the user’s name, account details, or a description of the problem they are having,” York continued. “Unlike phone-based IVR where a user has to work through menus, Twitter and other short-message communication services enable automated agents to supplement human support without putting a menu barrier in front of people. Automated agents can watch both public and private/direct Twitter messages and either respond with the appropriate information or make sure the appropriate person responds to the message.”

The IMified platform also supports outbound notification via Twitter and can be linked to other business processes and systems. A library, for example, can receive a query from a user about a certain book. When the book becomes available, the application can send the user a Twitter direct message with this information. In a similar fashion, a company can create a loyalty program that alerts users when specific sales or events occur. In both cases, the application can send automated messages from the same Twitter account used by company staff so that replies can be seen and handled by staff.

We’ve seen an increasing interest by companies in adding Twitter as yet another customer service / customer interaction channel. We want to help them expand and scale their Twitter usage.

For us it is all part of our broader “Unified Self-Service” vision where you can write an application once and have that application interact with customers in whatever medium they choose to contact you. I’ve drawn it this way:

That’s the vision we’ve been building for some time now… and we’re delighted to announce the addition of one part of the social messaging part of that picture today. Now… we’re excited to see what you all will do with it!

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, imified, twitter, microblogging, customerservice, enterprise, e2conf

Some days ago, we had our special-edition jam session

on the business advantages of personalization.

Michael Codini talked about how to:

·         Delight callers with personalization

·         Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs

·         Learn from customer behavior

·         Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, …

·         Deliver targeted offers

·         Leverage investments in business intelligence

You can find the pdf version of this presentation on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal.

Do you know about our monthly jam sessions? Upcoming topics are available on our developer portal, too.

If you are at the show and would like to say hello, please do email me. I expect to also be posting updates to Twitter on both danyork and voxeo.

You can also follow along with the conference “backchannel” on Twitter by following the hashtag “#e2conf”. Here’s an easy search URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=e2conf

We expect to have a very cool announcement out on Wednesday, too… but more on that then…

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Technorati Tags: e2conf, voxeo, danyork, dan york, enterprise 2.0, boston

Because of its integrated capabilities, it is very easy to use SIPoint to create a simple SIP switch for softphones like X-Lite to support voice, instant messaging, and presence.

System Overview

Here is how the system looks like. Bob, Alice, and John’s soft-phones are all connected to SIPoint via the local network within the same domain. For this example, let’s call the domain is example.com.

SIPoint Configuration

SIPoint has to be configured to manage the example.com domain. Here are the step-by-step instructions.

• Download SIPoint Installer from Micromethod website if you haven’t done so.
• Install SIPoint on a server (Linux/Windows/Mac) that is on a LAN with all the softphones.
• Start SIPoint by running startup.[sh | bat] from where SIPoint is installed. If this is the first time you run SIPoint, SIPoint should automatically populate its embedded database with all the default configurations.
• Now you should be able to access SIPoint’s Management Console at http://localhost:8080 from the server where SIPoint is installed. You log in with default name and password - admin/admin.
• The initial page of SIPoint’s Web Management Console gives you the system information.

  

• Click the node to get the general server configuration, including the default domains SIPoint manages. Add “example.com” to the list of Responsible Domains and select it as the default domain, as shown in the picture below. Please make sure you click the button to add the domain and click the button to make the changes persisted.

  

Softphone Configuration

Now you can configure the SIP-based softphones. Please note that softphones have to support SIMPLE in order to use the presence and instant messaging features. Regardless the SIMPLE support, voice communication should work as long as the softphones are RFC 3261 compliant.

Each softphone should be configured to use SIPoint as the default SIP Registrar and Proxy. Here is how you configure the X-Lite softphone on John’s machine.

• Configure the SIP account for John as the following. Please note the names are case sensitive.

  

• Configure the Presence to use Presence Agent mode.

  

• Add Bob (or Alice) as one of your contacts as the following. Make sure you enable “Show contact’s Availability” to enable presence.

  

Similarly you can configure Bob and Alice’s softphones and add the appropriate contacts.

Now you have a small SIP network with SIPoint Server as the switch. John, Bob, and Alice should be able to call and send instant messages to each other and see the other people’s presence.

If so, please join us for our next Developer Jam Session on:

Wednesday, June 24, 2009
8am US Pacific, 11am Eastern, 5pm Central European Time

In this webinar, Tobias Göbel will discuss implementing call control in VoiceObjects applications. The abstract is:

VoiceXML has rather limited capabilities in the area of call control, basically restricting the scope to blind or bridged tranfers. This Jam session will introduce CCXML and explain how it can interact with VoiceObjects applications to build advanced voice services including both call control and voice automation. Examples include outbound dialing, two-party bridging, call whisper, and multi-party conferences. Demo code will be provided so that participants can test the applications themselves using the free downloads of Voxeo´s Prophecy platform and VoiceObjects phone application server.

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook or following us on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: ccxml, voiceobjects, voxeo, voicexml

Scripting languages have revolutionized how users interact with the Web. They allow developers and business owners alike to remain agile in the face of ever-changing requirements. Jose will demonstrate how developers can leverage their existing AJAX skills to develop real world SIP applications. Examples will be provided in Groovy, JavaScript, Ruby and Python. (BTW “POTS” = Plain Old Telephone System.)

If you are planning to attend SOA World in New York or are in the area and would like to coordinate a meeting with Jose drop us a note!

During my graduate study at Stanford, I truly appreciated his willingness to reach out and help to off-campus students like me.

In recent years, Prof. Motwani has become well known among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs due to his early involvement in Google, Paypal, and other start-ups in the valley.

It is a huge loss to Computer Science at Stanford, and the industry as a whole.

My sincere condolence to his family.

http://help.imified.com/

Feel free to go there and post whatever questions you have about developing on the IMified platform.

And if you haven’t started trying out the IMified platform, why not sign up for a free developer account and give it a try?

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook or following us on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: im, imified

http://www.slideshare.net/voxeo/javaone-a-sip-of-java-rj-auburn

And the presentation, also embedded below, looks to be a classic RJ kind of talk… fun, lively, interesting… and also with some code. I don’t know if there were any recordings made, but if there were I’ll update the article with a link. Enjoy the talk!

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Technorati Tags: java, sip, sip servlets, sipmethod, voxeo, rjauburn

In an industry plagued by traditionally high agent turnover rates, contact center managers find themselves in a continual, expensive and time-consuming hiring cycle. Evolv eases the pain with a web-based application and screening process, and Voxeo-powered outbound calling.  

A joint press release issued today by Evolv and Voxeo includes these impressive stats:

Evolv’s end-to-end sourcing, selection and hiring solutions have helped leading call center organizations reduce agent turnover by 15%, boost hourly agent productivity by 20%, cut cost-per-hire by 35% and improve customer satisfaction, resulting in annual bottom-line impacts of seven to eight figures.

Evolv’s web-based software-as-a-service solution integrated quickly and tightly with Voxeo’s hosting platform. Before making a purchase decision, Evolv was able to prototype and trial their solution using Voxeo’s free hosted developer portal. Use of open standard VoiceXML significantly streamlined development and integration with Evolv’s backend systems.

Voxeo’s call progress analysis technology and methodologies for answering machine detection improve the success rate of outbound calls and streamline the user experience. Information provided by the job applicant can be used to trigger different versions of the outbound calling application. For example, an applicant’s indicated language preference or a client’s specific hiring requirements can be used to serve up call scenarios in languages such as English, Spanish or French. 

Advantages of the Evolv solution include:

• Eliminates dependence on the availability of the interviewer and applicant with an automated, 24×7 solution, thereby saving valuable time in the hiring process
• Provides accurate, real-time insight into applicants’ phone presence
• Frees recruiters to focus their energy on strategic sourcing, candidate management, and final selection as opposed to candidate screening
• Contributes to reducing the average hiring timeframe from weeks to days
• Reduces subjectivity and bias in the hiring process

Read our case study to learn more.  To optimize your call center workforce, performance and profitability, visit www.evolvondemand.com or contact Evolv On-Demand directly at (866) 971-4473.

While Voxeo holds regular technical Jam Sessions for our VoiceObjects developer community, this month we’re really jamming with a special-edition session on the business advantages of personalization. With personalization, self-service applications can automatically adapt to individual preferences and recent transactions for an improved customer experience, lower costs and untapped revenue opportunities.

Industry veteran and VoiceObjects founder, Michael Codini, will talk about how you can:

• Delight callers with personalization
• Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs
• Learn from customer behavior
• Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, recent transactions and more
• Deliver targeted offers
• Leverage investments in business intelligence

The online Jam Session will take place on Tuesday, June 16^th at 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 AM PST, 5:00 PM CEST.  You can register here.

Click here to learn more about our regular, monthly technical Jam Sessions.

Developer accounts are free over on www.imified.com. Please do sign up and check it out. We’d love to hear what you think of the service. (And you can safely assume that we’ll be evolving the service and adding more to it over the months ahead.)

One aspect of IMified that is a bit different from either Voxeo’s Evolution XML developer portal or our Tropo.com site is that with IMified you do need to host your application on a web server somewhere. With both Evolution and Tropo, you can host your application on your own server and simply point Evolution or Tropo to the URL of your app, but there is also the option with both services of hosting your apps directly within our hosted infrastructure. With IMified you do need to host your application somewhere and then provide the URL inside IMified when configuring your bot.

The beautiful thing about this, of course, is that it means you can write the bot application in whatever language you want on whatever operating system you want and using whatever tools you want. All your application has to do is use the IMified API to communicate with the IMified platform.

One place developers can host a web services app these days is certainly Google App Engine, and the IMified team just posted a knowledge base article showing an example bot in python hosted on Google App Engine. Courtesy of an IMified user named Barry, the source code is available in the IMified knowledge base. The IMified team notes that it’s also a good example of performing HTTP Authentication in python.

(And rather than include the source code here, I’ll just point you over to the IMified site.)

We’re excited about adding IMified to the Voxeo family of services and we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what people develop on the platform.

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Technorati Tags: im, imified, google, googleappengine, gae, python, voxeo

Voxeo Prophecy has received a 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC). The award recognizes products that benefit the customer experience as well as deliver ROI for the companies that use them.

See the complete list winners here on the Customer Interaction Solutions Web site.

Download Prophecy for free or sign up for instant access to our online developer portal and hosting.