This summer, Voxeo (News - Alert) announced their latest version of Prophecy, — Prophecy 9 — and offered up a Top 10 list of new features and benefits. Coming in at number ten was the newly announced support for Mac OS X.

 

I set out to learn a bit more about why this element of the new release was so important to include it among the Top 10 reasons. I heard back from Voxeo’s engineering team, and what follows is a recap of the responses they provided to my questions.

 

It is important primarily because it gives our customers and end users greater choice in terms of the operating systems they use for developing and deploying voice applications. Voxeo has made great efforts to offer a platform that makes it easy for people to build and deploy voice applications. Much of these efforts go into giving partners and customers the flexibility to use a variety of development tools methodologies, speech engines, standards and systems. Prophecy 9 gives developers access to a rich voice application platform that can be downloaded in just minutes, for free, and installed locally on any Mac running OS X Leopard. Because our platform is the same across all operating systems, applications can be developed on our platform on one operating system and then potentially deployed on a server running a different operating system. It’s all based on open standards — customers now just have greater choice.

 

Voxeo has a long history of innovation and leadership. We built our platform on SIP long before it was accepted as the de facto standard for IP communications. We’ve witnessed an increasing number of developers using OS X-based notebooks and desktop computers and a growing demand from our developer base. If you go to any of the leading-edge developer conferences, you increasingly see Mac laptops as the tool of choice — we think this trend will continue. In fact, Voxeo uses Mac laptops internally across all of our groups. We started out giving our internal developers a choice in laptop — they basically all chose Mac laptops and so pretty soon we just standardized on the MacBook Pro as the corporate laptop. We’ve heard similar stories from other companies. Similarly, as more and more of the functionality we use on a daily basis moves out into “the cloud,” the choice of your laptop/desktop operating system becomes increasingly less relevant — and as a result we’re seeing more people looking at Macs.

 

Given that trend, it was a logical step for us to include a Mac OS X build as part of Prophecy 9. Now we have the same great voice application platform across Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

 

The response has been outstanding. We’ve had several hundred downloads of the Mac OS X version of our early access release of Prophecy 9 and from the questions we’re seeing raised in our support forums we can see that people are really testing it out. Beyond that, though, the news of the existence of a Mac OS X version has brought customers to us who we’d not heard of before.

 

In a couple of cases, they are Mac OS X-only shops that haven’t had a native option for a voice application platform before. In other cases, the customers have developers who have Mac systems who want to know more.

 

Whatever the case, the availability of a commercial telephony platform for Mac OS X has brought them to Voxeo, so we’re pleased.

 

Definitely. As we said earlier, the move of developers to increasingly use Mac systems is a clear trend we’ve seen across the tech industry over the past couple of years. We’ve certainly had customers asking for a Mac OS X version. And as we noted, we ourselves have moved to using Mac systems. So the demand is definitely out there.

 

One thing we’ll be very curious to see over time is whether the demand for the Mac OS X version of Prophecy is for purely development purposes or is also for actual production deployment. Because our platform and the applications that are developed are identical across platforms, we could very easily see our customers having their developers using Prophecy on Mac OS X to develop their voice applications and then actually deploying those applications for production usage on Prophecy running on Windows or Linux.

 

That’s a great way people can work. On the other hand, we wouldn’t be surprised to see some of our customers actually use Mac OS X as the deployment platform. We’ll see... let’s check back in a year and we should have some good stats to share.

 

No, not really. Right now in our early access release for Prophecy 9, there are a few differences between the versions while we are still in the active development stage. For instance, the Mac OS X version uses the Mac’s built in Text-to-Speech (TTS) capability instead of our own TTS. Similarly, the SIP softphone we include in the Windows version is not yet in the Mac OS X version and so Mac users who want to test via SIP need to download and use one of the freely available SIP softphones out there like SJphone or X-Lite.

 

However, as we move toward the General Availability of Prophecy 9 and through subsequent early access/beta releases, we expect that those differences between the versions to be eliminated. Our goal now is that at GA the software will be the same across all three operating systems.

 

Our current target is Q1 2009, but you can expect to see further early access releases before the end of 2008.

 

They can just go to http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy and they’ll see a column on the page that talks about the Prophecy 9 Early Access Release and provides the link to download as well as the release notes. We also encourage people to sign up for a free developer account on our hosted system at http://evolution.voxeo.com/ where you can browse through and search the support forums and also raise support tickets if you encounter any issues. We have a 24x7 Extreme Support operation and we love to assist developers in getting going with building voice applications on our platform.