Voxeo Developers Corner

Anonymous Pro and Inconsolata – two free fixed-width fonts for programmers

Dan York — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:53:39 +0000

This has absolutely nothing to with “Voxeo” development tools, per se, but I thought it might be of interest to any of you out there who edit code in a text editor. Adam Kalsey in our Voxeo Labs team recently pointed out this nice font, Anonymous Pro, that is a fixed-width sans-serif font specifically designed for coding:

I’m admittedly a sucker for anything related to typography, so I did have to check it out. It’s a set of TrueType fonts for Windows, MacOS X and Linux developed by Mark Simonson and available for free under the Open Font License. Code looks quite nice in the font when editing.

Another similar font I’ve enjoyed using is “Inconsolata” developed by Raph Levien and also available for free under the Open Font License:

You might ask – why does this matter? I mean, programming code doesn’t have any formatting when it’s compiled, so who cares about the font! Well… if you are working for much of the day using a code editor, it can be great to use a typeface that makes your code very readable on the computer screen or printed output.

What do you think? Are there other fonts that you’ve found you like to use for working with code? (There are many out there…)

Slides: Comparative ASR Evaluation (Dan Burnett, SpeechTEK NY 2010)

Dan York — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:11:16 +0000

Have you ever wanted to compare automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines? That was the topic of a three-hour tutorial given by Voxeo’s Dan Burnett at SpeechTEK last week in New York. Dan gave a hands-on session as part of “SpeechTEK University” where students received an in-depth lesson in how to compare and evaluate ASR engines. The session description was:

9:00 AM – 12:00 PM – STKU4 – Performing a Comparative ASR Evaluation- Dan Burnett, Director of Speech Technologies

There are a variety of choices for speech recognition engines, especially for languages other than English. Although many companies are comfortable performing business case analysis across speech recognition engine vendors, it is often difficult to know how to compare accuracy. In this handson, in-depth course you will learn how to select an appropriate evaluation data set, why transcription is important and how to do it properly, how to perform the evaluation, and how to analyze and interpret the results.

Dan’s slides are available for viewing and download:

Comparative ASR Evaluation – Voxeo – SpeechTEK NY 2010

View more presentations from Voxeo Corp.

Obviously you need some of the sample files to work through the lab exercises, but the rest of slides do cover what Dan discussed.

Slides: Mashups: Integrate Multiple Web Services Into Your App

Dan York — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:55:35 +0000

At SpeechTEK last week in New York, Voxeo’s Dan Burnett was part of a panel session on the topic of “speech mashups.” The session description was:

10:15 AM – 11:00 AM - C101 – Mashups: Integrate Multiple Web Services into Your App - Dan Burnett, Director of Speech Technologies

Learn how speech technologies from recognition to transcription and beyond, now available in the cloud, are being accessed to create multimodal applications. Learn how new licensing models are emerging; novel partnerships are being formed; and the role of vendors, operators, and developers is being redefined. See demonstrations of some new service opportunities made possible with speech mashups. Discover how easy it is to create your own mashups that use speech and how they compare to what you can do with VoiceXML.

Dan talked about mashups and then demonstrated a mashup using Tropo and the Ruby programming language. His slides are available for viewing or download:

Speech Mashups – Dan Burnett – Voxeo – SpeechTEK NY 2010

View more presentations from Voxeo Corp.

Download free GA version of Prophecy 10 today!

Dan York — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:30:14 +0000

As we announced today over on our Voxeo Talks blog, the GA version of Prophecy 10 is now available for free download onto Windows, Linux or Mac OS X at:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy10

Both the Voxeo Talks article and the Prophecy 10 Release Notes describe in more detail all the great features and improvements in this release. The most significant improvement for you all may be the huge performance increase with P10. While previous Prophecy versions maxed out around 400-500 simultaneous calls, we’ve demonstrated P10 running upwards of 6,000 simultaneous calls per server.

This Prophecy 10 release was really all about focusing on performance, reliability and usability improvements… we’d love you to try it out and tell us what you think about it!

Video: How To Create Text Messaging (SMS) Applications on Voxeo’s Platform

Dan York — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:41:29 +0000

As part of our 100% Uptime Guarantee for Text Messaging we announced earlier this week, I posted a short video showing the process:

If you haven’t tried it out yourself, turning an existing voice application into a text messaging application is literally just one radio button on a form… try it!

P.S. If you want to try it out yourself but don’t yet have an Evolution account, just head over to evolution.voxeo.com. Accounts are free for development use… as are the phone numbers and the inbound/outbound text messaging.

5 Steps To Get Started With VoiceObjects On-Demand

Dan York — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:15:57 +0000

If you want to build voice, SMS or IM applications using the VoiceObjects On-Demand service we announced today, here are the five easy steps you need to do to begin:

1. CREATE AN EVOLUTION ACCOUNT (if you don’t already have one) – Just head over to evolution.voxeo.com and sign up for a free account. If you already have an account, you’re all set.

2. DOWNLOAD/INSTALL VOICEOBJECTS 10 DESKTOP FOR ECLIPSE – Head over to:

http://developers.voiceobjects.com/trials/downloads.php?product=vod

And download “Desktop for Eclipse” (DfE) for either Windows or Mac OS X. The download has everything you need. You do not need to separately download/install Eclipse.

The installation does come with a full “Documentation” directory if you would like to read more about VoiceObjects.

Note: If you already have Eclipse installed on your system, we will be releasing the plugin separately later… for right now, though, you need to download the full bundled DfE and run VoiceObjects On-Demand out of this installation.

3. LAUNCH VOICEOBJECTS 10 DfE – Double-click the “Eclipse” icon and start up Desktop for Eclipse.

4. CHANGE FROM STANDALONE MODE TO VOICEOBJECTS ON-DEMAND – Go up to the “Eclipse” menu and choose “Preferences”. You will see a screen like this:

Click on “VoiceObjects” on the left side and select the radio button next to “Work with VoiceObjects On-Demand”. Enter the login credentials for your Evolution account (that you may have created in step #1), press “Test connection” and, assuming that works, press “OK”.

5. START WORKING WITH THE SAMPLE APP – You now will see a “Guess my number” app visible on the left side of your Eclipse window. That’s a VoiceObjects sample app. Click the arrow next to the name to see “Version 1.0″:

Double-click “Version 1.0″ to see the app in the Object view. Open up the Components and then Module areas:

Control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) the Guess My Number module and choose to “Deploy Application” to the “VOD Sample App” service:

Start calling!

NOTE: We have identified a bug where the “Click to call using Skype” function does not work on the Mac version of VoiceObjects 10 DfE. We’re still working on it… in the meantime, you can use Phono to call the app or configure additional numbers in Evolution.

That’s it… now, there is a lot more you can do with it. For starters, you can log back into Evolution and add a phone number for voice or SMS and add IM names. (Stay tuned for a blog post on that!) You can also check out the documentation that comes with your installation…. and watch for more blog posts here.

Want to learn VoiceXML? Visit www.vxml.org

Dan York — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:51:59 +0000

Do you want to learn more about how you can use VoiceXML to create voice (and now SMS) applications? If so, we have an incredibly easy URL for you to remember:

www.vxml.org

That’s it. In fact, you can even drop the “www” and just go to “vxml.org“. Simple. Easy.

There on the site you will find tutorials, VoiceXML sample code, a detailed VoiceXML language specification, a handy VoiceXML element reference, and appendices covering everything from VoiceXML best practices to advanced VoiceXML topics.

You can try out all the examples, too, either in our hosted cloud with a free account on our Evolution developer portal or on your own premises with a free download of our Prophecy platform for either Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. In our hosted cloud, you get free inbound telephone numbers and outbound calling, plus Skype and SIP connectivity.

Plus, you can let your VoiceXML applications communicate not just with voice but also via SMS and IM. One app – multiple channels. For free. (Pretty cool, eh?)

And, if you run into trouble or can’t figure out how to do something in VoiceXML, our Customer Obsession Team is standing by at “support@voxeo.com” or in our web forums to answer your questions. (And yes, they gladly answer questions from developers using free accounts!)

Slides: What is new in Prophecy 10?

Dan York — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:00:53 +0000

If you would like a little taste of what is new in the upcoming Prophecy 10 (for which RC2 was just made available for download yesterday), Voxeo VP of Engineering Dan Polfer gave a brief talk at the Voxeo Customer Summit last week where he outlined the new features and changes in the release. His slides are now available on SlideShare:

Voxeo Summit 2010: Prophecy 10 – Unified Self Service

View more presentations from Voxeo Corp.

You can try out Prophecy 10 yourself by downloading a free version.

New Prophecy 10 Release Candidate 2 now available for download (10.0.43379.0 RC2)

Dan York — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:51:32 +0000

Following on our recent release of Prophecy 10 RC1, we are pleased to announce Prophecy 10 RC2 available for download today at: www.voxeo.com/prophecy. We’re getting very close to a final release with this RC2 and feedback is very definitely appreciated. New functionality in Prophecy 10.0.43379.0 RC2 includes:

Added user roles Operator, Support – user accounts designated as “Operator” can administer the server but cannot modify user accounts; user accounts designated as “Support” have read-only access to the Prophecy administrative console.
Added the ability to control the sound level and speed on media through the SSML “media” tag
Improved support for recording in MP3 format
Expanded the list of available voices for multiple speech server modules
Added a tutorial link to the initial splash dialog
Added support for apostrophes in utterances
Miscellaneous usability improvements

Note: This Prophecy 10 RC2 release is still part of our Early Access release program and should be used at your own risk. Prophecy 9 is also available for those wanting a stable production release.

The new version of Prophecy 10 can be downloaded for free for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux at http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/ More information about Prophecy 10 in general can be found in the release notes.

Questions or feedback about Prophecy 10 can be raised either as private support tickets in your Evolution account or in the public Prophecy 10 Beta forums.

July Jam Session: Providing Self-Service Through SMS Applications

Sabine Winterkamp — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:06:38 +0000

Mobile self-service was long thought of as either Web-based or IVR-based. Voxeo is opening up new channels for customer self-service, such as Twitter or Facebook, as well as those that have been around for a long time, such as Instant Messaging or SMS.

It is easier than ever to create, manage, and report on multi-channel services using Voxeo technology.

In this developer jam session, Tobias Göbel will show you how to use VoiceObjects (Voxeo’s service creation, execution and reporting environment) as the front-end and IMified (Voxeo’s hosted texting platform) as the back-end to deliver self-service over SMS with unmatched ease of development and time to market.

Join us for this jam session on July 22, 2010

8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European

REGISTER NOW