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.

TwitterFacebookLinkedInFriendfeedFlickrYoutubeTumblrmetaweblog

Tags

Archive

2010 (1)
2009 (43)
 

Its official - Adhearsion & Voxeo

Media_httpjsgoeckefil_afilo
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.
Posted
 

Adhearsion (アドヒアジョン) & Tropo presentation at Ruby Kaigi - Tokyo 2009

I just gave my talk at Ruby Kaigi in Tokyo Japan. The event is well organized and attended. I suppose that is a bit easier since Tokyo is the home of Ruby, and filled with 13 million people. Here are the slides: [slideshare id=1732968&doc=rubykaigijuly2009-tokyojapanese-090716214905-phpapp02]
Posted
 

Adhearsion Website and Sandbox Migration Complete

Media_httpjsgoeckefil_ahqti
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.
Media_httpwwwvoxeocom_kchhi
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!
Posted
 

Writing Voice Apps in the Clouds with COBOL

Following on the heels of Voxeo's announcement
Media_httpjsgoeckefil_mysbj
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.
Posted
 

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?

Media_httpjsgoeckefil_xmxgt
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.

Read the rest of this post »

Posted
 

Writing a Ruby app for Tropo

Media_httpjsgoeckefil_gmhby
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.

Read the rest of this post »

Posted
 

Tropo & Adhearsion @ eComm

Media_httpjsgoeckefil_pfhar

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]
Posted
Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.
​