Today here at SpeechTEK in New York City, we formally launched the early access edition of our new release, Prophecy 9. With this release (which you can download now) we have announced several major steps in the evolution of our product:

1. Prophecy 9 is cross-platform with support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Yes, Prophecy 9 is indeed out on Mac OS X! In fact, at this exact moment you can go to the Prophecy page and download the Mac OS X build now. (Windows and Linux builds are on their way soon.) In fact, we believe that Prophecy 9 is the first comprehensive, standards-based telephony application platform to support Mac OS X.

Why Mac OS X? Simple. Go to any developer conference and look at the dominant laptop in use. Look at our office where the MacBook Pro is our corporate laptop. Developers have spoken and are choosing Mac OS X in huge numbers. We understand that - hence the Mac version. We don’t honestly know how many customers will actually run Mac OS X on production servers, but the beauty of our platform is that it works the same across all operating systems, so developers can build applications on Prophecy on one operating system and deploy those apps in production on another.

Speaking of production environments, our customers have been asking for a Linux version and we are delighted to provide that with Prophecy 9. P9 will run on any Intel-based CentOS 5 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system. Between this new Linux support and our existing Windows support, Prophecy 9 should now be able to be deployed in any data center.

2. Prophecy 9 will redefine what it means to manage large numbers of servers.

Don’t believe me? Look at this (click on the image for a larger version):

I’ll put up a screencast soon to show how incredibly cool this “3D wall” is… it displays the current status of all your servers and you can zoom in, move around, view individual servers. But there’s even more (click on image for larger version):

From a product point-of-view, here’s what we’re calling these new management features:

• Prophecy Commander - a new operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning system that lets customers easily deploy and manage telephony applications on a single server, single-site cluster, or multi-site cluster of Prophecy servers
• Prophecy Dashboard - provides a comprehensive yet concise overview of the performance of any Prophecy server, server group, virtual platform, or application
• Prophecy Log Analyst - collects and indexes Prophecy generated data and call logs in real time

And yes, that “Prophecy Log Analyst” is a premise version of the Prophecy Log Search we provide in Evolution. How great is that?

[Note: The "Dashboard" shown above is not in the early access release of Prophecy 9 available today but is expected to be in the next beta release.]

3. Prophecy 9 will offer new SIP APIs for developers

Since it’s inception, Prophecy has been entirely based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and all about the open standards of VoiceXML and CCXML… what we call “XML-based telephony”. With our acquisition of Micromethod Technologies, also announced today, we’re now adding into the product the following:

• Prophecy SIPcore - adds support for the latest SIP and IMS standards for Voice over IP
• Prophecy SIPmethod - a converged SIP servlet, HTTP servlet, and Web-service application server, used for rapid development and deployment of Java-API based communication solutions
• Prophecy SIPpoint - a comprehensive solution for SIP user collaboration, connectivity, routing, and messaging

I’ll be writing much more about SIPmethod over on our Voxeo Developers Corner blog in the weeks ahead, but suffice it to say now that developers will be able to use SIP Servlets - JSR 116 and JSR 289 - which will open up all sorts of new opportunities for applications to interact with our platform.

Beyond all of that, Prophecy 9 delivers over 200 smaller improvements and fixes as well as all features found in Prophecy 8. More info can be found in our news release and perhaps more importantly the Prophecy 9 Release Notes.

WANT TO PLAY?

Do you want to try out the early access release of Prophecy 9?

Just go to www.voxeo.com/prophecy and look for the “Get Prophecy 9 ‘Early Access’” column.

Do keep one thing in mind: this is an “early access” release. You may find bugs. You may find things are missing (for instance, on the Mac version the SIP phone we include in Windows isn’t there and we recommend instead that people download SJphone). We know that.

The point is that we want to give you all a chance to play with the new release. Tell us what you like. Tell us what you don’t like. (Please just raise tickets in Evolution as you normally would.)

We’re incredibly excited about all the new features we’re rolling out… and we look forward to hearing what you all think!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, prophecy, voicexml, ccxml, sip, applications, micromethod, programming, apple, mac, macosx, linux

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Today we are extremely pleased to announce our acquisition of Micromethod, a developer of SIP-based communication and collaboration software based in Beijing, China, and San Jose, CA. Micromethod CTO Wei Chen, now Chief Architect for Voxeo, reporting to CTO RJ Auburn, provided this video comment from the floor of SpeechTEK:

{seesmic_video:{”title”:{”value”:”Voxeo announces the acquisition of Micromethod”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://seesmic.com/video/PWaH9WbzIx”}}}

With the acquisition of Micromethod, we gain an Asian presence and also add three new products:

SIPMethod - an end-to-end platform for rapid development and deployment of SIP communication solutions. SIPMethod supports more than 30 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Java Specification Request (JSR), and W3C standards including SIP and HTTP Servlets, JAX-WS, JMX, and STUN. SIPMethod also supports converged SIP and HTTP applications, enabling flexible mashups of telephony, IM, presence, web 2.0, and SOAP/REST services and applications.

SIPoint - a comprehensive solution for SIP user collaboration, connectivity, routing, and messaging. SIPoint is built on the SIPMethod platform, includes SIP registrar, location, redirect, proxy, instant messaging, XCAP and presence services, adding support for 18 more IETF standards for SIMPLE, and OMA and 3GPP presence.

Horizon - a highly effective SIP firewall, NAT, and VPN solution. Horizon both enables secure SIP audio, video, and data connections and helps those connections traverse existing firewall and NAT implementations that block or break SIP-based collaboration. Horizon is also built on the SIPMethod platform. An H.323-compliant version of Horizon is also available.

You’ll see much more here on our blog site about these products in the weeks ahead. We’ve already incorporated Micromethod software in our new early access release to Prophecy 9 and will be offering much, much more in terms of integration in the future. In the meantime, you can read about SIP Servlet programming at the Micromethod developer portal or download Prophecy 9 for Mac OS X today and try it out yourself!

We welcome our new colleagues in both Beijing and San Jose and look forward to the incredible things we’ll be doing together!

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Today here in New York, the SpeechTEK conference starts in a few hours and we’ve got quite a crew here in the city. We’ll have a booth in operation… RJ, Jose and I are speaking… Moshe Yudkowsky and other “friends of Voxeo” are speaking… we have some MAJOR news announcements coming out this week… press/analyst briefings… and so much more! It’s going to be a busy week for us all.

If you’d like to stay up on what we’re doing throughout the week, here are some ways you can do so:

• This Voxeo Talks blog - we intend to be posting updates throughout the show.
• Our twitter stream - twitter.com/voxeo - I’m intending to use it to post about some of the activities we’re doing as they are breaking.
• Our Flickr stream - www.flickr.com/photos/voxeo - We’ve been taking some photos already… next we need to upload them!
• My (Dan York) Twitter stream - twitter.com/danyork - I’m set up to send updates from my Blackberry so depending upon how good the show Internet coverage is, I may wind up tweeting more to my personal account.

And if you are here at the show, please do drop me a note and let us know… and do stop by our booth (#804) and check out what’s new!

And now… with audio and video gear in tow, I’ve got to head downstairs and get ready for the start of the show…

Technorati Tags: speechtek, voxeo, conferences, newyork

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Earlier today while fixing another problem here on the site, it was pointed out to me that the “Submit Comment” button was almost on top of the Seesmic raccoon logo for video comments:

This fix was relatively straightforward. I just headed into <WPMU>/wp-content/plugins/seesmic-wp-plugin and then found my way down to lines 179 and 180:

<div id="see_buttons_div" style="display:block; width:100%; clear:both">
                <a onclick="see_set_comment_mode('videoRec','comment')" style=

where, yes, indeed, I simply inserted two <br>’s on line 180:

<div id="see_buttons_div" style="display:block; width:100%; clear:both">
                <br/><br/><a onclick=”see_set_comment_mode(’videoRec’,'comment’)” style=

And yes, the irony of adding BR tags after today’s earlier exercise was not lost on me. In any event, the little racoon is now not practically on top of the Submit Comment button:

And yes, it’s a kludgy hack that will undoubtedly be blown away if I ever upgrade the Seesmic plugin… but hey, the beauty of it all was that I could tweak it to fit our site.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, plugins, seesmic, video

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Today we had a wee bit of fun with HTML tables… Jeremy, a member of our support team, published a post on our Voxeo Developer’s Corner blog that had an HTML <table> in it. Now it turned out that this was the first time in the 10 months that we’ve had this blog site up that anyone has used a <table> tag… and WordPress MU wasn’t terribly happy about it! What happened is that WPMU inserted a <br/> tag at the end of every line of HTML in the table. Annoyingly, the BR tags were inserted outside of the <TD> tags with the result being that a browser bizarrely interpreted the BRs to be a bunch of blank lines before the table.

Naturally I blamed Rick’s CSS file for lacking some table handling and he of course blamed all my plugins for messing up the formatting. A Google search helped us find out that the answer was neither but instead was actually WordPress itself.

This web page started out with the key heading “Disabling WordPress’ slap-happy approach to <br /> tags” and provided the answer. That web page is for WordPress 2.0.2 and we’re now running the equivalent of WP 2.5, so the file is no longer functions-formatting.php but instead simply formatting.php. As before it lives in <WPMU>/wp-includes.

Inside the file starting at line 62 was this:

function wpautop($pee, $br = 1) {
        $pee = $pee . "\n"; // just to make things a little easier, pad the end
        $pee = preg_replace('|<br />\s*<br />|', "\n\n", $pee);

One simple change of “$br = 1″ to “$br = 0″:

function wpautop($pee, $br = 0) {
        $pee = $pee . “\n”; // just to make things a little easier, pad the end
        $pee = preg_replace(’|<br />\s*<br />|’, “\n\n”, $pee);

and… ta da… the BR tags went away and the table no longer had this mass of white space before it.

Fun, fun, fun…. (well, not really)

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu

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Hello everyone—I’m Meghan Goth, the newest addition to Speech Technology magazine. I’ll be keeping you up to date on all of the latest speech happenings around the world on our Web site, as well as posting my thoughts and questions for you here on the blog.   I’ll be taking over for Lauren, whom I have unfortunately [...]

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Here in Support we get a fair amount of tickets asking about variables.  Namely, if a variable is created in a form can it be accessed in the field of that form or in a different form? What I am talking about is called variable scoping.  In VXML there are several different variable scopes.  You might have heard of global and local variables with other programming languages.  VXML, while not a programming language, is similar in how it approaches variables and how they can be accessed.

First lets get a proper definition for variable scope.  The scope of a variable defines when and where the variable exists and may be accessed. When the VXML browser exits the scope where the variable is defined, the variable is out-of-scope and cannot be accessed. When a variable is in scope, it can be accessed by both VoiceXML and ECMAScript.

Here is a table of the different scope levels of variables in VXML:

Here is an example of document scoped variable.  As you can see it is accessible throughout the current VXML document.

<?xml version=”1.0″?> <vxml version=”2.0″>

<var name = “counter” expr = “0″/>

<form id=”F_1″> <!– additional VXML code –> <filled> <assign name=”counter” expr = “counter + 1″/> </filled> </form>

<form id=”F_2″> <!– additional VXML code –> <filled> <assign name=”counter” expr = “counter + 2″/> </filled> </form>

</vxml>

Here is an example of a dialog scoped document.  In form “F_1″ the value of “counter” after the assign <element> would be 1.  In form “F_2″ the value after the <assign> value would be 2.

<?xml version=”1.0″?> <vxml version=”2.0″>

<form id=”F_1″> <!– additional VXML code –> <filled> <var name = “counter” expr = “0″/> <assign name=”counter” expr = “counter + 1″/> </filled> </form>

<form id=”F_2″> <!– additional VXML code –> <filled> <var name = “counter” expr = “0″/> <assign name=”counter” expr = “counter + 2″/> </filled> </form>

</vxml>

It is also good to know that variable references will match the closest applicable scope. You can prefix a reference with a scope name, such as application.counter, for clarity or to resolve ambiguity.

We hope this clears up a little confusion about VXML variables and where they are defined and when they can accessed.

Jeremy Richmond VXML Certified Developer

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There is a virtual lab for Speech Server over on the MSDN site. It is titled Anywhere Information Access with Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server. I've registered but I haven't ran the lab yet as I have too much going on at the moment to find the time.

Enjoy.

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Will you be at SpeechTEK next week in New York? If so, you’ll see a whole crowd of us from Voxeo. RJ and I will both be speaking and more Voxeons will be there staffing our booth. In keeping with what has become our tradition, we have a number of major announcements we’ll be making… stay tuned for more!

If you are going to be there at the show, please do drop me a line or swing by our booth (804) on the exhibit floor.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, speechtek, conferences

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Ever wanted to pass variables between a CCXML and VoiceXML app and weren’t sure how? Well, now you can learn in a recently posted tutorial from Voxeo staff member Jeff Menkel: Passing variables to and from VoiceXML and CCXML. This tutorial builds on the previous piece about passing variables to CCXML applications as well as other pieces of the CCXML documentation. It’s well worth a read and shows how easy it is to use CCXML and VoiceXML together.

Technorati Tags: applications, voice, voip, voicexml, ccxml, voxeo, tutorials

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