Archive for the ‘Video’ Category

Customer Spotlight: Speak2Leads

Friday, November 18th, 2011

We are proud to feature Speak2Leads on this week’s Tropo Customer Spotlight. I sat down with Sammy James, the Founder and CEO of Speak2Leads, to discuss their business and how they are using Tropo (and Phono).

You have probably heard the old proverb, “the early bird catches the worm”. This phrase was first recorded in John Ray’s A collection of English proverbs from the 17th century. The saying holds true for the first person to speak with a lead.

Speak2Leads’ technology is perfect for connecting the right lead with the right agent over the phone and the right time. Neither party needs to dial the other. Once a web form is submitted or a document is opened, Speak2Leads can place two calls and bridge the two together in a matter of seconds!

Sammy and his team continue to iterate on new features coming to Speak2Leads that improve both customer experience and lead closing rates. Their new feature in the works is a proactive voice call (similar to a proactive chat but better). Using Phono, our Javascript Phone API, an agent will receive a call if someone sits on a webpage for a given amount of time. If the agent would like to speak to the person on their website, an incoming phone call to the webpage is placed allowing the viewer to answer or reject the call for help. I am eagerly looking forward for this amazing idea to launch!

To learn more about Speak2Leads, visit their website at http://speak2leads.com.

Customer Spotlight: Radish Systems

Friday, November 11th, 2011

We are proud to feature Radish Systems on this week’s Tropo Customer Spotlight. I sat down with Theresa Szczurek and Dick Davis to discuss their ChoiceView platform and how they are using Tropo.

Choice View from Radish Systems is a giant step forward in enhancing traditional voice-powered IVR calls. In fact, they may have coined the term “Visual IVR” because you can now see and interact with the IVR call flow from your smart phone. ChoiceView is available today and runs on iPhone and Android-powered devices.

In addition to automated Visual IVR calls, customer service and support agents can interact with callers live during the call and even push web pages or order forms to the device while the caller is on the phone call. Here is a video of a call center agent upselling Theresa on a larger bouquet of flowers.

Radish Systems also discusses their new REST API in the works that will allow any voice-powered Tropo application to add a ChoiceView Visual IVR dimension to their existing IVR application to help drive customer interaction costs down while improving customer experience and increasing revenues! Sounds like a win-win-win for everyone involved.

To learn more about ChoiceView from Radish Systems, visit their website at http://radishsystems.com.

Customer Spotlight: FetchNotes

Friday, November 4th, 2011

We finally got a chance to catch up with the guys (@_chaselee and @alexschiff) behind the popular new notes service called FetchNotes!

What makes FetchNotes so cool? For one, it has a super simple web UI. The entire site behaves like an app and leverages Python’s Tornado Webserver and AJAX to add and tag notes without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Tags are basically hashtagged keywords in the note that allow the app to categorize notes by topic.

Secondly, FetchNotes leverages Tropo to deliver a truly multichannel communications experience. Today FetchNotes extensively leverages Tropo’s SMS services but the team has already started working on adding Tropo’s Voice with transcription service as well as Tropo’s Instant Messaging services on all of the IM networks including: GTalk, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Jabber! We may even see support in the near future for in-browser, voice-powered note taking using Tropo’s Javascript Phone API, Phono.

Thirdly, Chase and Alex are working to add groups and third-party integration into other services such as GitHub or Google Calendar. This would allow developers, testers, and users to take a note about a #feature or #bug and tag it accordingly and watch the note get pushed to other services as GitHub issues or even calendar entries on Google!

The FetchNotes service is still in private beta but the first 50 new subscribers that click on fetchnotes.com/invite/tropo will be allowed to register for the service and check out the new coolness first hand!

Customer Spotlight: OneReach

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

I was privileged to have the opportunity of moderating the Tropo Customer Spotlight session at the Voxeo Customer Summit in Orlando, Florida last week. Six customers each gave a brief presentation on their business followed by a discussion on how they are using Tropo to deliver their Voice, SMS, and Instant Messaging services.

We were fortunate to be able to sit down with Rich Weborg and Heath Phillips of OneReach afterwards to discuss their business in more detail. OneReach provides an easy solution for managing your customer communications using customized voice, text messaging, email and social networking channels to engage your customers with meaningful information in ways they appreciate. Without further ado, here’s our interview.

Modernize Your App with Speech Recognition

Thursday, October 6th, 2011


This commercial was released in 1971 but touchtone (DTMF) was originally invented in 1941. That was 70 years ago! If your voice application is still using touchtone for user input, don’t you think it’s time to enter the 21st century?

Tropo offers speech recognition in 24 languages by default on every prompt allowing callers to use either touchtone or their voice to answer prompts during the call. We support four forms of speech recognition grammars include:

  1. Simple Grammars – Tropo’s comma delimited grammar strings
  2. GrXML – Speech Recognition Grammar Specification Version 1.0
  3. JSGF – Java Speech Grammar Format or the JSpeech Grammar Format (in a W3C Note)
  4. ABNF – Augmented BNF (Backus Normal Form)

Using Tropo’s simple grammars are incredibly, well, simple. Here is what an auto-attendant’s dial directory prompt would look like using Tropo’s simple speech recognition grammar.

ask "Welcome to the Tropo company directory.  Who are you trying to reach?", {
    :choices => "department(support, engineering, sales), person(chris, jason, adam)",
    :onChoice => lambda { |event| 
        say("You said " + event.choice.interpretation + ", which is a " + event.value)    
    }
}

From here you could also transfer the call to the department or person’s phone number or SIP address by substituting the onChoice say prompt with the following logic:

say "Please wait while we transfer your call. Press star to cancel the transfer."
transfer ["+14075550100","sip:12345678912@221.122.54.86"], {
    :playvalue => "http://www.phono.com/audio/holdmusic.mp3",
    :terminator => "*",
    :onTimeout => lambda { |event|
        say "Sorry, but nobody answered"}
}

The possibilities of developing new voice apps using speech recognition are endless! For one, your customers will have a better user experience (UX) by not having to press buttons on the phone. Secondly, apps such as language translater applications and personal assistant applications are now possible.

We want to be your speech recognition and cloud communications partner.

Writing and Deploying a Tropo App with an iPad

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

I recently found myself at a conference without WIFI and i wanted to write and deploy a new Tropo voice application to the cloud. Armed with my 3g iPad, this task was a snap! See for yourself…

New Fax Library for Pythonistas

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

Remember the post we did earlier this year with the Ruby gem written by Jason Goecke called pamfaxr for sending and receiving faxes? Well we are excited to announce that there is a new Python library by Jonathan Sweemer to do the same thing! Here’s the source code on GitHub too!

Jailbreaking OpenVBX

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

Remember when the iPhone was only available on AT&T?   That was true until October 11, 2009 when a young coder named geohot (and friends) released the first iPhone/iPod jailbreak.  Suddenly iPhones weren’t tied to to just AT&T…now you could give AT&T the boot and choose Verizon or T-Mobile as your service provider.  Score!

In the spirit of geohot’s jailbreaking efforts, the rapscallions at Disruptive Technologies took on the the task of “jailbreaking” OpenVBX.

OpenVBX is a web-based open source phone system. It’s essentially a virtual PHP/MySQL PBX  and it’s available for download from GitHub.   Users of OpenVBX can make phone calls, send text messages…all very cool.

The catch is…you’re locked into one service provider: Twilio.  There’s no way to choose to use another cloud telephony provider…until now.

Today we’re pleased to announce a new fork of OpenVBX that adds support for Tropo.  For the first time, users of OpenVBX will have a choice of multiple platforms on which to run it, making it REALLY OpenVBX.

The coders at Disruptive Technologies added full support for the the Tropo API and Phono SIP-based VoIP web phone to the communications layer of the OpenVBX project. Of course, when selecting the Tropo API, users will now get access to all of the more advanced features of the Tropo network: speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages, phone numbers in over 40 countries, international SMS, in/outbound SIP VoIP support, inbound Skype support, multiple phone numbers per callflow script, improved conferencing.

Disruptive Technologies also extended OpenVBX with the VoiceVault API to support Voice Biometrics in password resets. After adding VoiceVault credentials on the API Accounts Tab, the password reset dialog will provide an option to request a phone call to reset your OpenVBX account password.

The OpenVBX fork with Tropo can be found on GitHub.  We have sent the maintainer of the OpenVBX project a pull request to merge these updates into the project. The following features and bugfixes have been added to the OpenVBX package:

  • Fixed a redirect bug. OpenVBX no longer incorrectly redirects users to 404 pages.
  • Fixed bug in Twilio client. 60 seconds after the user has been “inactive”, the client is no longer able to be called for that user. This prevents calling the client if the user has closed their browser. (This also works for the Phono Client)
  • Added support for the Tropo API. You can now add a “Tropo API account” on the system settings page, and from the installer. Either a Tropo or Twilio account is required. Included in the new Tropo API additions are:
    1. Support for Tropo domestic and international phone numbers, on the “numbers” page.
    2. All applets in the “flows” page now support Tropo JSON as well as TwiML. Any number can be assigned any flow – so a tropo number and a twilio number can both be assigned the same flow.
    3. Support for existing Tropo numbers & applications. If the user prefers to set up their numbers initially in Tropo.com, the application will see these numbers and they can be assigned a flow within the application.
    4. Recordings, and Voicemail, as well as outbound dialing with Tropo.
  • Several theme changes. The OpenVBX logo has been modified to include both the Tropo and Twilio logo. If only one of the accounts is active, only that logo will show in the VBX logo – so if a user only has a Twilio account, only the Twilio logo will show, and vice versa. Other minor theme changes:
    1. Several pages in the System Settings tabs have been reworked.  Notibly the API accounts page, which now has each API accounts logos.
    2. Step 3 of the installation has been reworked.
    3. Several Twilio-specific content has been changed to be more ambiguous.
  • Added support for “Phono” browser phone, in addition to the Twilio Client. Any non-Twilio based numbers will use the new Phono browser phone.

This project has since been renamed to TropoVBX. Please refer to the updated blog post and new source code repository on GitHub.

Batman.js Goes Live!

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

batman.js

We’re really excited for our friends at Shopify, who recently released an alpha version of an awesome JavaScript micro-framework called “batman.js“.

You can read all about this exciting new framework, and download it (it’s open source) from the batman.js site. You can also read the release announcement on the batman.js blog.

Earlier this year, Nick Small from Shopify gave an in-depth talk on batman.js at JSConf in Portland, Oregon.

Nick even included some demos at the end, including a really cool Tropo + batman.js mashup that even got event organizer Chris Williams to suit up as the Caped Crusader himself.

You can see a video of Nick’s JSConf presentation here.

Congratulations to Nick and the entire team at Shopify on the release of batman.js!

Realtime Conferencing Dashboard with Tropo and Chloe

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

In yet another installment on this blog demonstrating how to build realtime applications with Tropo, I walk you through the process of creating a conferencing dashboard with Tropo and the Chloe realtime web server from Mashion.

Chloe is a great open source project that works extremely well with the Tropo platform. With Chloe and some modest Tropo and jQuery code, you can build a sophisticated and powerful conferencing dashboard.

You can get executables for Chloe by visting the Chloe GitHub repo, and you may also download the source and build on your local machine as well.

The sample code that I demonstrate in this screencast is also available on GitHub.

This example demonstrates yet again how ideal Tropo is for building powerful realtime communication applications. Chloe is easy to work with, powerful and open source, making it an excellent compliment to the apps you can build with the Tropo platform.

Check out the Chloe project and stay tuned to this blog for more posts in the future about building realtime apps with Tropo.