Warheads Stacked in the Kitchen

Jason Goecke
Jason Goecke

Jason Goecke has a long history in telephony. His unique perspective is built on extensive business experience around the world as well as technical depth. His passion for disruption manifests itself in his on-going support of open source telephony, with the latest phase being his commitment to the Adhearsion project.

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2010 (1)
2009 (43)
 

Its official - Adhearsion & Voxeo

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Adhearsion is effective in making telephony applications easy to develop. The next phase is to make deployment and scaling of these applications easy while increasing choice of development environments. The first step in accelerating this phase was announced today, Adhearsion and Voxeo Launch Voxeo Labs! It is time to take Adhearsion to the cloud. Some of you that have been following along closely, may already have noticed our involvement with Tropo.com. We worked closely with Voxeo at the inception of Tropo which was subsequently launched at eComm in March of 2009. The goal of Tropo.com is to bring a scalable telephony cloud infrastructure to the broadest group of developers by allowing development directly in dynamic languages. Languages included are: Javascript, Groovy, PHP, Python and Ruby. We will now be focused on bringing Tropo and Adhearsion together to offer the power of Adhearsion with the scale of Tropo, while extending capabilities in the other languages. Jay and I as founding members of Voxeo Labs is no accident. The DNA of Voxeo Labs is a commitment to open-source. Adhearsion will continue to evolve as an open-source framework with continued support for Asterisk along with Tropo and others. Our goal is to provide the widest possible set of deployment choices for the Adhearsion community, while eliminating friction for those who want effortless deployment and scaling. Stay tuned as we have lots of interesting announcements just around the corner. In the meantime, thanks to the entire Adhearsion community for the support that allowed us to pursue this next step.
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Adhearsion Website and Sandbox Migration Complete

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Over the last week we have been working to migrate various Adhearsion services to new homes. This could not have come a moment too soon, as during the migration one of the hard drives in our server in Texas gave up the ghost. Of course we used RAID, so we did not miss a beat, but clearly it was time to move along. To this end we have now migrated the Adhearsion website, wiki and API docs to Amazon EC2. Leveraging S3 and EBS we have a great solution that allows us to quickly fire up more servers if and when needed. The cloud is great. We have also moved the Sandbox to a new hosted server.
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Our friends at Voxeo have provided a great server for us and are now sponsoring the Adhearsion Sandbox. It is great to have a visionary leader in the telephony cloud space involved with the Adhearsion community. I would like to take this opportunity to remind folks what the Adhearsion Sandbox provides. We have provided a hosted system that takes away the need to install your own Asterisk to get started developing Adhearsion applications. Simply install Adhearsion, sign-up for a Sandbox account and get started writing apps. Our goal is to lower all the barriers to make it easy for developers to realize the possibilities of voice in modern web development. Enjoy the new servers!
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Writing Voice Apps in the Clouds with COBOL

Following on the heels of Voxeo's announcement
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of support for COBOL in their recently released Tropo.com platform, I have put together a script showing how to use this great new feature. Finally, I may use the language that first introduced me to the wonders of computer programming to develop voice apps in the clouds. The first application I participated in writing was a Computer Telephony Integration system using COBOL on HP3000s. This system is still alive and well today and now may be adapted to take advantage of all the clouds have to offer. Considering the codebase has not been touched since 1999, and then only for refactoring, this is a tremendous leap forward. Here is an example to get you started, I will be posting to GitHub shortly: [sourcecode language='delphi'] $ SET SOURCEFORMAT"FREE" IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. CallingGrace. AUTHOR. Jason Goecke.
  • Demonstrates the use of Tropo.com
  • for writing voice applications from
  • all the world's systems that use
  • COBOL in the clouds.
DATA DIVISION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 MenuStr PIC X(99) VALUE "Please tell us what you would like to know about Grace Hopper.". 01 RetryCntr PIC 9 VALUE ZEROS. 01 MenuOptions PIC X(99) VALUE "war('Where did Grace work?'), bug('Where is that moth?')". 01 MenuResult PIC X(99) VALUE "". 01 SayGoodbye PIC X(99) VALUE "Thank you for calling, goodbye.". 01 PleaseTryAgain PIC X(99) VALUE "Invalid choice, please try again." 01 WarDeptPhone PIC 9999999999 VALUE 7035456700. 01 SmithsonianBugs PIC 9999999999 VALUE 2026331000. LINKAGE SECTION 01 TROPO-PROCEDURES PROCEDURE DIVISION USING TROPO-PROCEDURES. 000-MAINLINE. CALL 'ANSWER'. PERFORM UNTIL RetryCntr = 3 MenuResult = CALL 'ASK' USING MenuStr MenuOptions. IF MenuResult ALPHABETIC PERFORM 200-CALL-DESTINATION. RetryCntr = 3. ELSE CALL 'SAY' USING PleaseTryAgain. ADD 1 TO RetryCntr. END-PERFORM. GO TO 300-EXIT. 200-CALL-DESTINATION. IF MenuResult EQUAL 'war' CALL 'TRANSFER' USING WarDeptPhone. IF MenuResult EQUAL 'bug' CALL 'TRANSFER' USING . 300-EXIT. CALL 'SAY' USING SayGoodbye. CALL 'HANGUP'. STOP RUN. [/sourcecode] It is a fact, there are more lines of COBOL in use in the world today than any other single computer programming language. I applaud the visionary leadership behind Tropo.com siezing this giant opportunity to bring voice from the clouds to all of those systems out there.
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Skype for SIP == Skype for Asterisk DOA?

Today Skype announced Skype for SIP (SFS). Put simply, enterprise telephone systems may now interconnect with the
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Skype network to receive calls from the Skype network and place calls to SkypeOut. All without the need to install any special hardware or software on most modern enterprise phone systems (IP-PBXs to be more specific). Skype's new enterprise targeted connectivity uses SIP, the industry standard for VoIP interconnection. SIP already powers the bulk of Skype's revenue, via SkypeIn/SkypeOut, so this is a logical progression to take advantage of the large scale infrastructure already in place at Skype. This is a tremendous move by Skype and one I have contended for years was necessary for them to make headway in the enterprise. I applaud this step. There are plenty of great posts out there covering this already, including the one by @danyork on Disruptive Telephony. What does this mean for Skype for Asterisk (SFA) announced last September? At best the value of SFA has been signficantly reduced by this announcement. Previously SIP interconnection to the Skype cloud was given to the rarified group of larger players such as Voxeo, Tellme, Genesys and others. SFA was the first time this access was going to be brought to the world of open source telephony developers through Asterisk. This provided an immense opportunity for the Asterisk developer community to create new applications to take advantage of this, which lead me to invest time to participate in the closed beta for SFA still underway. The SFS announcement this morning has just marginalized SFA to applications that benefit from direct dialing of Skype users from Asterisk and from basic presence updates from the Skype network. Gone are the benefits of providing Skype/SkypeIn inbound calls to the enterprise, SkypeOut trunking, etc. More so, SFA is at a disadvantage since you will have to pay a per channel (simultaneous call) license fee on top of any SkypeIn/SkypeOut costs. Further, I suspect that the number of SFA channels available to a single account will be limited for the same reason that SFS does not do SIP to Skype dialing, so that no one may provide large scale alternatives to SkypeIn. All of this has really taken the wind out of the SFA sails before it even had a chance to make it to a public beta. Digium must now look to quickly add new features. Such as advanced presence information, instant messaging, the SILK codec and others, if they hope to salvage their own investment in the development of SFA to date. While I understand these things take time, the lethargy of getting the SFA to market does not bode well for rapidly trumping the SFS announcement. Time will tell.
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Three new ways to access the Adhearsion Sandbox

Since the launch of the new Adhearsion website earlier this year we have made a Getting Started Sandbox available to developers. We want everyone to easily give Adhearsion a try without having to setup an entire telephone system to do so. All you need to do is install Adhearsion (and maybe Ruby, depending on which operating system you use) and you may immediately begin using our free Sandbox in the cloud. Here are the new access methods that we have recently added (more details are available on the Getting Started page here):
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Phonefromhere has a Java IAX2 client that is a great way to access the Sandbox from the internet. Tim Panton of Phonefromhere has graciously made his hosted system available to us. Check out their app, as I am sure you will find it useful for your new Adhearsion applications as you roll them out.
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We have been participating in the Skype for Asterisk (SFA) closed beta. We have already developed the Skype Utils Adhearsion component that I mentioned in a previous blog post and will be making available as part of the Sandbox soon. In the meantime you may use Skype to access the Sandbox to get a preview of how you may easily develop apps for the Skype world leveraging Adhearsion and Asterisk.
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Voxbone has kindly donated a 10 channel inbound phone number for use with the Adhearsion Sandbox. So now you may simply use any old telephone to test your Adhearsion applications on the Sandbox infrastructure. Enjoy!
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Using Adhearsion and Asterisk with the Tropo cloud

You have written a great Adhearsion application and now you want to add some fancy Speech Synthesis or Speech Recognition. Your best option has been to acquire software to install on your Asterisk server. While there are open source applications available, such as Festival and Sphinx, they take a fair amount of know-how and work to tune, and then still may not perform as you hope. There are also some great commercial applications out there such as Cepstral and Lumenvox, but they require an upfront investment and add additional overhead to your Asterisk server. What if you could just obtain these services from the cloud and pay as you go?

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Now you can. Tropo was announced last week at eComm as dicussed in my previous post from the conference. Since we had the opportunity to work with the folks at Voxeo on the launch of Tropo, integration to Adhearsion is available for the initial release. This integration allows you to invoke services from the Tropo cloud as needed in your Adhearsion dialplan, obtain the results and then continue on in your dialplan. This means industry leading Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis on a per minute basis with no need to install any third party engines may now be added to your Adhearsion app.

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Writing a Ruby app for Tropo

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Tropo is a great step in the right direction. Voice enabling your applications powered by a voice cloud is simple again. No need to mess with XML-based interfaces and get straight to writing your application with an effortless API. The first phase of Tropo allows you to write an application in Javascript, PHP, Groovy, Python or Ruby. To get started you may register for a free developer account on the Tropo website. After logging in you then have two ways you may deploy your applications. The first is to drop the script you have created on a web server and give Tropo a URL, the second is to post your script directly into Tropo with their free file hosting service. For this Ruby app we will be creating the file locally and dropping it on a web server for Tropo to fetch.

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Grid.com launches @ eComm

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We have been working with the guys at Grid.com for the past several months. They announced their launch at eComm in San Francisco yesterday, with a focus on providing fictionless APIs to speed telephony and related development. We plan to work with them closely in the coming weeks, in the meantime have a look at their presentation from eComm here: [slideshare id=1101744&doc=11jamiesiminoff-090304141316-phpapp01]
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Tropo & Adhearsion @ eComm

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Today Voxeo announced their new Tropo cloud platform at eComm in San Francisco. Jay and I have had a great time working with them over the last month for the initial launch and future phases of this exciting new platform. Tropo is to voice what Google AppEngine is to the web. You may now write your apps in Groovy, Javascript,  PHP, Python or Ruby and deploy them directly to the Tropo cloud. The launch of Tropo validates the Adhearsion philosophy that voice apps should be written based on an API in a modern web language. Given that Voxeo are arguably the largest VXML hosting provider in the world, we could not ask for a more appropriate partner in this brave new world of telephony development. Adhearsion does work with Tropo today. We have written a Tropo application and Adhearsion component to support the new service. We will continue to work closely with the folks at Tropo to expand upon this integration to enable Adhearsion to provide additional capabilities leveraging the Tropo cloud. In the meantime you may now have some great Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition on-demand with Adhearsion and Tropo. You will see much more from us in the coming days on this topic. In the meantime watch Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo, launch Tropo @ eComm here (and we definitely appreciated the shout out!). *UPDATE* The Tropo slides from the launch are now posted online. [slideshare id=1097498&doc=tropo-ecommlaunch-20090303-090303184753-phpapp01]
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