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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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, JavascriptPHP, 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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