Voxeo has announced it expanded its free developer program to include international SMS numbers, support for European languages and local direct inward dialling "DID" numbers.

These enhancements are targeted at developers in EMEA and, company officials said that new additions allow for the creation of voice, IVR, text and multi-channel communications applications in a free development environment.

Thanks to the inclusion of SMS-enabled international numbers, developers can add SMS-enabled numbers and enable their application to communicate with customers via both voice and text/SMS.

Company officials also said that applications using automatic speech recognition "ASR" or text-to-speech "TTS" can now choose from more than 20 languages and voices, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Swedish, UK English and many more.

Additionally, developers can add international inbound DID numbers from over 40 countries to their applications via a simple Web interface, as well as in the development environment, applications can make outbound calls for free to 18 countries.

Previously developers could test using U.S. numbers, as well as using Skype or SIP. Company officials said that developers can now dial local numbers in countries across EMEA to test their applications.

Voxeo's (News - Alert) developer portal provides free hosted access to the Prophecy Platform, and also resources. In addition, it also offers technical support for the easy creation of IVR, voice recognition, VoIP, SMS or communications applications.

"With these new enhancements to our hosted developer program we're making it simple for anyone to get started building a truly global application using voice or SMS," said Jonathan Taylor, CEO at Voxeo.

Earlier in March, Voxeo launched its Tropo cloud communications API. Tropo extends web applications to easily drive communications via Twitter, telephone, text messaging and IM.