SIP Server Featured Article

Voxeo One Step Closer to IVR / Speech Recognition Platform Goals with Release of Prophecy 9

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Senior Editor

Interactive voice response (IVR) platforms and services company Voxeo (News - Alert) on Tuesday launched Prophecy 9, the latest release of its platform for speech, SIP-based VoIP and IVR solutions. This a major upgrade, with ten new features designed to reduce the cost of delivering voice applications.

 

Prophecy 9, now available with two free ports (phone lines), took 18 months of development, Voxeo’s CEO, Jonathan Taylor, told TMCnet. It builds on what the company has learned over the past four years, since first responding to market demand for an accurate, cost-effective speech recognition engine.

 

“We asked our speech recognition partners if they could deliver such a product, they said they could, but they weren't really interested in lower priced options,” Taylor told TMCnet, recalling how the engine that drives Prophecy came to be developed. “We felt very differently. When customers tell us they really want something, we listen very closely. So we decided to start work on our own speech engine.”

 

The name for the product, Prophecy, was chosen in part as a way of indicating that the future for speech recognition and IVR didn’t have to lie in expensive products, Taylor said.

 

“Given the customer demand, we felt a massive shift in pricing was inevitable,” he said.  “In that sense our efforts to bring a low-priced engine to market really is a prophecy, and perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy for the more expensive engine vendors.”

 

Developing the type of speech recognition/IVR solution that truly delivers on the promise of Prophecy means that, while the new release greatly adds to the product’s previous capabilities, Voxeo sees lots of room for more development.

 

“We have long-term vision for what Prophecy will become, and we're only half way there today,” Taylor said.

 

That being said, Prophecy 9 does offer some pretty compelling new features, summarized below.

 

Commander  — An operations, admin, maintenance and provisioning system for deploying and managing telephony apps on a single server, single site-cluster, or multi-site cluster of Prophecy servers.

 

Dashboard  — Comprehensive, concise overview showing performance of any Prophecy server, server group, virtual platform or application.

 

Log Analyst  — Collects and indexes Prophecy-generated data and call logs in real time, so IT staff and developers can search, navigate, analyze, measure and report on stats, transactions and errors in real-time.

 

Recognizer  — The speech recognition engine, with support for both U.K. British and U.S American English.

 

Recorder  — Secure, two-way call recording platform.

 

SIPcore  —Voxeo’s SIP stack, with support for the latest VoIP standards (SIP and IMS).

 

SIPmethod  — Converged SIP servlet, HTTP servlet and Web service app server for rapid development and deployment of Java API-based communications solutions.

 

SIPoint  — Solution for user collaboration, connectivity, routing and messaging; a full-featured SIP registrar, location, redirect, proxy, instant messaging, XCAP and presence server built into the SIPmethod platform.

 

Linux support  — Makes the system compatible with any Intel (News - Alert)-based Centos or RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 system.

 

Max OS X support  — Turns Prophecy into the first comprehensive, standards-based telephony app platform to support Mac OS X, according to Voxeo.

 

Those last two features — Linux and Max OS X support — are growing increasingly important as Voxeo’s customers look beyond Windows for administrating communications solutions.

 

“About 20 percent of our prospects and customers want to deploy on Linux, and that percentage is growing every year, Taylor said. “We also expect to transition to the Linux version of Prophecy in our own IVR hosting business, where we run over 70,000 ports — or phone lines — of Prophecy software.  We run over 1,000 servers in our hosting infrastructure today. Moving to Linux can save our customers  — as well as us —  a great deal of money over time.”

 

Support for Mac OS X is mostly geared toward the developer crowd.

 

“If you go to any developer-focused show or conference these days, you see more and more Macs in the audience,” Taylor told TMCnet. “We have always made sure it was very easy to develop applications on the Voxeo platform, and our support for Mac OS X now extends that ease of use to the desktops and notebooks developers are increasingly switching to.”

 

In all the new Prophecy features, and its continued development of the product, Voxeo is striving to become both the most desired and the largest telephony platform vendor, Taylor said.

 

“Our prior successes — especially in the areas of customer service excellence and worldwide hosting capabilities — have taken us very close to becoming the most desired vendor,” he said. “In fact, over 75 percent of our customers, when surveyed, tell us we are the best vendor they have ever worked with, in any industry. Prophecy 9, including the new Micromethod (News - Alert) product it incorporates, significantly improves the versatility and thus desirability of our products and services.”

 

Taylor’s mention of Micromethod, incidentally, refers to technology recently acquired by Voxeo — also announced this week.

 

All of this adds up, ultimately, to features and a vision focused on continuing to exceed the expectations of Voxeo’s customers, which are a pretty varied lot. Taylor said the company’s clients can be categorized as software developers and service resellers; collectively they cover a very broad spectrum due to the variety of markets being focused on.

 

“Our customer base is extremely varied, from five-person startups at the one end, to Fortune 5 companies at the other,” Taylor explained. “Both the smallest and largest customers increasingly desire IVR, speech, and SIP platform options that are significantly less expensive and complex than those offered by our competitors. They really appreciate Prophecy 9 because it addresses those desires.”

 

Ultimately, Taylor said, the success of Prophecy hinges on Voxeo’s ability to focus on what customers need and want, and to go above and beyond what it expected.

 

“We focus on the success and service of our customers like no other vendor in our industry,” he said. “We invite anyone to try our products and services for free, and to experience the excellent technical and installation support we offer at no charge. Once customers start working with us they quickly realize just how important customer service excellence is to Voxeo and they get hooked.”

 

To take Taylor up on his invite, visit www.voxeo.com.

 

Related News

 

• IVR's Voxeo Releases Cost-Saving Prophecy 9 SIP-Based VoIP Platform
• Voxeo Eyes Asia-Pacific, Bolsters IVR, SIP-Based Products with Micromethod Acquisition
• Voxeo IVR and SIP-based VoIP Available as OEM Platforms
• Prophecy IVR from Voxeo Wins 2008 North American Frost & Sullivan Award
• Voxeo Launches Platform for Hosted IVR and SIP Services

Voxeo is a Platinum sponsor of Communications Developer Conference, the first and only IP Communications Developer event, collocated with Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO — the biggest and most comprehensive IP communications event of the year.   Communications Developer and ITEXPO (News - Alert) will take place in Los Angeles, California, September 16-18, 2008, featuring three valuable days of exhibits, conferences, and networking opportunities you can’t afford to miss. Visit Voxeo at booth #126 in the exhibit hall. Don’t wait. Register now!

Mae Kowalke is senior editor for TMCnet, covering VoIP, CRM, call center and wireless technologies. To read more of Mae's articles, please visit her columnist page. She also blogs for TMCnet here.