ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn posed this question in his post “Can open source take down Ribbit?”. Dana said:

So how tough would it be to build something like Ribbit, based on Appcelerator, and distribute that under the GPL? That would certainly get the frog into someone’s throat.

Dana says that Ribbit’s cool and I agree. The concept of a new telephone company is not really new. In fact, part of what Vonage and others like Vocalocity have been doing for awhile now are part of trying to re-invent the telephone company as we know it. We know it as cold, proprietary and stock full of cash. As of recent years, we also remember them as part of litigations such as with MCI, massive consolidation back into Ma Bell, and way behind the rest of the world in getting high-speed Internet access into our homes. I’m sure Judge Greene never imagined the break up would come back around to this.

Ribbit is adding their name to the attempt to re-invent the telephone company and dubbs their company “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company” and has the following statement on their front page:

Ribbit is a new kind of Phone Company, born from the realization that legacy phone companies are not going to bring us the communication innovation we are all looking for.

That’s a bold statement and exciting at the same time. It also happens to be true, at least the part of the realization.

But was about Dana’s question about an open source alternative to Ribbit?

First, all of the components needed to build an open source Ribbit are already in place and in fact have been so for awhile. There’s also some not-fully-open-source-but-open-standards alternatives that could be used quite readily and that my previous company had been involved in developing for a number of years.

So, the ingredients:

First, add CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. Voxeo offers a great standards based server that has all 3 of these ingredients backed in as part of their Prophecy platform. You can even get a free, 2 port version of their software to download or build and run your apps in their network.

Second, add Appcelerator RIA + SOA services to enable communication to Voxeo over standard HTTP. In fact, we’ve SOA-enabled CCXML/VoiceXML in conjunction with one of our System Integration partners, Newfound Communications and deployed 2 large Voxeo-based telephony projects using next generation web as the front-end interface. One of the systems is doing over $2M per week in transactions. You can bring the power of web 2.0 to telephony 2.0 and create compelling applications.

Third, add Mashups to your applications like integration with Salesforce.com or a variety of other sources to create a compelling integration of enterprise data, your phone and your web content.

OK, so this isn’t so much an open source play. Or is it? These bits above represent a set of commercial applications using both open standards and open source technologies. If you could pull together the pieces of the ecosystem – you could create an interesting Ribbit-in-the-wild (open source) play.

Or, another possibility is using Appcelerator RIA+SOA and enabling this using Asterisk. Asterisk is SIP-based and could easily be used because of it’s large open source community to create an interesting Rabbit open source play. Appcelerator RIA could be used to build the front-end and SOA-enablement bits with Asterisk handling the telephony bits. Both Asterisk and Appcelerator are also GPL.

Anyone interested? Let me know.

Tech Tags: appcelerator asterisk voicexml ccxml sip voxeo ribbit

I had the opportunity for the past several years to work in a very large working group in the W3C and also participate on some different IETF activities. I’ve largely stopped working on formal standards work in the past 9 months – although there is one RFC draft that we’re close to completing related to SIP and VoiceXML.

Yesterday, after over 4 years of work, the W3C recommended VoiceXML 2.1. This might seem reasonable to anyone involved in standards activities. Let me put this in perspective. The 2.1 spec was a minor, orthangonal “maintenance” update from the VoiceXML 2.0 specification (which also took many years to finalize). The goal was something we could get through fast and something that (a) a majority of participating vendors had already implemented and (b) that didn’t change anything in the 2.0 spec. We had thought it would take a year at most. There was long debate about putting all of our effort on VoiceXML 3.0 – which was planned to be a large change in the core spec – instead of spending time on 2.1.

We did the original spec authoring relatively quickly and published the first working draft in the spring of 2004. At the time, I was one of the primary co-editors of the spec along with Ken Rehor, our chief architect at Vocalocity and the original author of VoiceXML 1.0 and 2.0 spec. Like Tellme, Voxeo, Voicegenie, Voxpilot and Loquendo (and probably others), we had all agreed between us on the core spec features and had all implemented the spec when we authored it. So – this should have been a slam dunk. Then, enter the W3C process.

The W3C process is generally a good process. However, like any process, it has it flaws. The process is much different from the IETF process of “rough consensus”. They both represent two extremes in how a standards process can work. While the W3C takes almost herculean strides to make everyone have a say (and present a challenge which stops progress), the IETF looks for general consensus and never counts votes. IETF meetings are famous for “hum votes” – instead of raising your hand if you agree with something, in IETF meetings, they might ask for a “hum” or a “finger snap” vote. The louder the noise, the more positive (or negative) the vote. Also, in W3C meetings, in person voting and meetings are largely more important and final than the e-mail list. In the IETF, you can never attend a meeting in person and have plenty of authority and input – in fact, any in person vote has to be confirmed on the list.

I won’t go into all my personal reasons why I believe that the VoiceXML 2.1 spec took so long. We had a number of ridiculous challenges from some people outside of the Voice Browser community about the specification – people who had no vested interest in the success or failure of the spec and would never implement it – but wanted to get their input taken. We had a number of “fights” about how to deal with procedural issues because of the W3C beaurecracy and a number of procedures we had to follow that really didn’t apply to the group or the spec itself. In the end, I’m happy to see after 4 years of development on a spec that took us only a couple of months to author – it’s finalized. What’s more funny is how the industry and the people involved have completely changed since we first started out:

Matt Oshry from TellMe — Matt was the chief cat herder of the 2.1 effort and TellMe was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year. Funny enough, when I started working with the Voice Browser working group – Microsoft was very very active and vocal. They then one day stopped caring about the spec. And then shortly afterwards, introduced a competing specification called SALT. SALT failed very publicly less than a year later and Microsoft later came to my company (Vocalocity) and decided to OEM our browser for their telecommunications product. And now, with the TellMe acquisition, their one of the largest VoiceXML vendors in the world. Michael Bodelle was also from Tellme and very involve early on in the development.

Brad Porter from Tellme — Brad was also one of the key architects of the spec. Brad is now with Amazon running their web services platform.

Paolo Baggia from Loquendo — Paolo is still with Loquendo and probably one of the only remaining independent companies that has survived.

Dave Burke from Voxpilot — Dave is now working on mobile for Google and relocated from Dublin to London.

Dan Burnett and Jerry Carter — Both Dan and Jerry joined us after leaving Nuance for Vocalocity. Dan left after the acquisition and Jerry just before and went back to Nuance to continue working on standards. Dan was also the chief editor for the SSML specification.

Scott McGlashan of HP – Scott’s company Pipebeach was acquired before the 2.1 spec was initial released by HP and he’s been working with HP since.

Alex Lee and Mark Scott from Voicegenie – Voicegenie was acquired about a year or so ago by Genesys.

Emily Candell from Comverse – Comverse is a large public company and there still doing fine and I assume Emily is still with them.

RJ Auburn – RJ is still the CTO of Voxeo and Voxeo is doing well. A number of people from Vocalocity went to work for Voxeo after the acquisition.

Ken Rehor – after Vocalocity, Ken has been continuing to be a leader and evangelist in the VoiceXML community. Enough great things can’t be said about Ken and his efforts.

Congratulations to the voice community for getting this spec through – it’s been a long time coming.

technorati tags: w3c, ietf, voicexml, ssml

This is a question I have been pondering lately. I’m not as active in the speech industry these days – for several reasons. I won’t entirely list them here, I’ll save that for another post one day. However, one reason is because I believe the speech industry is stagnated a bit and isn’t enjoying the growth we’re seeing in other technology sectors. I am however still watching the industry and still involved loosely with a few projects.

Today, I received my normal email solicitation from Bill Meisel. Bill is a legend in the Speech Recognition world if you don’t already know him. He’s currently an analyst and runs a firm called TMA Associates and publishes a newsletter titled “Speech Strategy News”. Today’s brief email said the following:

Apple’s iPhone is a well-publicized example of the changes in telephony. On the device side, the wireless phone is migrating into all all-purpose portable assistant and entertainment center. Communications infrastructure is also getting a makeover with the integration of the telephone and other communications modalities using Web and network standards. Ad-supported services, including directory assistance and information portals, are making telephony even more analogous to the developments in the Web world.

But the Web analogy can be taken too far. The Graphical User Interface that served the PC and Web world so well has obvious limitations on mobile devices with small screens and clumsy text-input modes. Any phone can call a network-based service and immediately have a Voice User Interface using speech recognition, and that VUI is the same on any phone. This creates opportunities that some companies are already beginning to exploit for services to consumers and businesses. Call centers will soon find that free directory assistance and other trends increase the number of calls and change their nature. Company telephone systems are also evolving into Unified Communications systems, and speech technology makes the many features of such systems usable. Speech technology can also automate field forces using only cell phones.

Do speech recognition and other speech technologies work? Yes, despite a tendency to paint anything short of human abilities as a limitation. When implemented well and used in appropriate applications, the technology is extremely effective. And the many successful deployed applications prove it.

Bill’s right about how much a device can be limited compared to the offering of an in-network speech recognition application. Speech recognition applications can also enjoy a lot of the benefits of a web application, especially when built on a VoiceXML (and CCXML and other related web standards) architecture.

But what’s the hangup for the industry? Why the slow down?

It seems, like usual, there are always a multiple of reasons – many of which are timing, technology, finance and just pure circumstantial – all of which are uncontrollable. However, I believe there are a couple of reasons that are addressable by the industry as a whole.
First part, the pricing doesn’t work.

Lucky for Nuance these days, they’re not only the 800 lb gorilla – they’re really the only significant player left in the marketplace as far as real speech recognition and text-to-speech product offerings go. They’re the monopoly player in the speech space, and they’re really exploiting that advantage from a distribution and pricing standpoint. They’re going to extract as much from that position in terms of power and pricing as they can. Ultimately, I believe, to their detriment – or better said, to the reduction of their own marketplace.
Speech has always been a “nice to have” – not because you can’t build compelling applications that reduce cost. Not because you can’t craft a compelling ROI. Mike Dickerson, my previous co-founder at Vocalocity (which we are no longer at), always use to say that speech suffers from the “I” part of the ROI being “too expensive” to get to the “return on” part of ROI. In other words, if the investment is so large that you have to risk the return, it’s no longer compelling and just increases the risk that you were hoping to mitigate in the business case. Speech is just too expensive. Speech, except for a few applications, is a nice-to-have, it’s a luxury item – it’s nice technology, but only for the chosen few. It really helps and generally people like it – if you are willing to spend more to get it. In every case I was involved in, once you got it deployed and working, they loved it. You just had to justify the cost first, and build a business case that made sense. That seemed to always be the hardest with a nice-to-have technology like speech recognition.

Unfortunately, as the web continues to be more pervasive and ubiquitous, it continues to be just as fast, far less risky and much less expensive than voice. And Bill is right, “the web analogy can be taken too far”. People should stop trying to make the voice web fit the visual web. However, what I think we’re seeing, is the interactive web is making it more difficult to justify (at the current pricing) the voice web. Of course, I’m not trying to say the voice web is necessarily going away – that would be silly. However, with email, IM, SMS and web browsers built directly into these devices – and with the availability of wi-fi networks everywhere – it’s almost impossible to not have access to the Web, when needed. Also, as more and more software is deployed over the web as services using a modern browser, you almost don’t even have to have your own computer to gain access to necessary data and applications anymore (Another early justification for the phone and VoiceXML, that’s losing ground).

So how do you change this? Lowering pricing is certainly one way. I think you’d start to see, over a period of time, the ability to make speech more dominant in phone applications. However, you have to couple that with a healthy eco-system and partner base of developers to get innovative applications conceived, developed and deployed. And that leads to the second issue…

Second part, the ecosystem isn’t healthy.

The voice ecosystem has been dying in the past 2-3 years. The evidence of this is that many small to mid-size companies (in relative terms to the industry itself) have merged with larger companies. SpeechWorks was bought by Scansoft and then Scansoft and Nuance merged into Nuance after many years of fierce competition. VoiceGenie was acquired by Genesys Labs, which was also the acquirer of Telera. Numerous smaller companies are either getting collapsed by larger companies or they’re simply going away. Several smaller companies such as Voxeo and Angel.com seem to really be making serious headway in their businesses (I will say because I believe they’ve embraced the web model directly) and are growing significantly. However, the sign of so much merger mania really is the fall out of the fact that the “speech industry” isn’t there. It’s not big enough, it’s not compelling enough, and hard enough to maintain on its own. Speech really is just (or really should be) another technology feature of an interactive application. And, to make matters worse, even the industry conference and magazine recently merged with a larger conference as John Kelly sold SpeechTek to Information Today. Mergers can be good. In this case, they’re the direct reaction to survival. You must merge to stay alive and in most of these cases, that’s the underlying reason. Heck, even Intel sold off its telecommunications unit, Dialogic, to another smaller company, Eicon Networks – and Brooktrout (the Dialogic competitor) has merged with Excel Switching to become Cantata. While they’re not speech only companies, everyone in the industry recognizes them as major players in the industry. (By the way, these are just a few mergers, there have been many, many more such as Intervoice and Edify or the shocking IP Unity and Glenayre).

If you’re in to “reading the tealeaves”, another interesting note is how many people are “leaving” the industry. Or, maybe not really leaving, but relocating to bigger opportunities, whether that be directly or indirectly related to the “speech industry”. Industry veteran and ex co-founder and CTO of Snowshore and CTO of Cantata just left this past week to join BEA as Deputy CTO. Smart move in my opinion given the state of everything that’s going on there and in the industry. Of course, numerous other people have joined Google in the past 2 years from the industry.
So, where is the industry headed?

Gosh, if I knew that, I’d still be in the industry and probably be an analyst, or better yet, a billionaire.

There are a lot of changing dynamics in the “speech industry”. The 800 lb gorilla is small in relative terms, they have a $2B market cap and did almost $400M in 2006. But, they also have a fairly diverse portfolio of products such as scanners and dictation, of which speech recognition is only one part.

For many years, we’ve thought IBM and Microsoft would get serious and get into the business. They’ve made some decent steps forward, but nothing serious yet.

Like we’ve said in the past, maybe 2007 will be the year… (But, don’t bet on it)

technorati tags: speech, voicexml, ccxml, nuance, cantata, bea, asr, tts

I got notified today by the RFC Editor of the IETF that one of the specifications I co-authored with Dave Burke of Voxpilot, Mark Scott of Genesys Labs, RJ Auburn of Voxeo and Scott McGlashan of HP last year has been published as an informational draft and now available.  The draft is called draft-burke-vxml-02.txt.
In the specification, we described a standard mechanism for a SIP interface to VoiceXML media services, which is commonly employed between application servers and media servers offering VoiceXML processing capabilities. Many of the modern VoiceXML browsers support a SIP interface – however, at the time, each of them had a different way to address them, how they dealt with media and how data was passed back and forth. In this specification, we tried to lay out a standard way that all VoiceXML Browsers supporting SIP should implement.

I’m not as active in the VoiceXML or W3C community as I have been in the past 5 years – however, I recently began a very interested project for a call center doing an Ajax, Web 2.0 enabled Agent Desktop and using VoiceXML and CCXML for the backend. We’re using the Voxeo software to build the application. It’s been fun getting back involved with these types of capabilities – but what is most interesting is the merging of modern web capabilities with next generation telecom and IVR to build a next generation call center application. This makes Asterisk look like a play toy. We’re using our new open source framework, called Seam(less), to rapidly built the application and integrate it into the Voxeo CCXML platform in a very unique way. I’m hoping that we’ll have the opportunity to open source some of the messaging we’ve built from the Seam(less) message broker to the Voxeo CCXML Event I/O interface. It’s truly a very interesting and powerful integration.

technorati tags: ietf, sip, call, control, ccxml, vxml, voicexml, voxeo, hp, genesys, voxpilot, seamless, asterisk, voip

If you have not already heard, today ZiVva annouced the acquisition of Vocalocity. You can read the press release to get a little more information.

This does mark the end to my involvement with Vocalocity. It is a very bitter sweet ending. I would like to thank Jim White of Sutter Hill Ventures, Mike von Grey of Revenue Med, Kelly Conway of eLoyalty, Sig Mosely of Imlay Investments, Said Mohammadioun, Lou Santora and all the other close advisors of the company, employees and investors – and most of all, I would like to thank Mike Dickerson, my partner and loyal friend for 5 tough and rewarding years at Vocalocity. I will forever be indebted to you and all the people that made Vocalocity a success.

At Vocalocity, we had the concept of taking complex and ever changing communications standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP, to name a few, and making software that completely followed the standard and that was available on an OEM basis to larger customers. To name a few: Microsoft, IBM, Aspect and Siemens. We also strongly believed that standards in the communications world would completely disrupt their proprietary cousins, over time. Time being the operative word. Standards have taken over, but at at rate that is hard to track. SIP has become so mainstream that some of the largest carriers in the world are using it natively. VoiceXML has completely taken over the IVR and next generation interactive voice application space. MRCP is now the de-facto specification for interfacing with a speech server.

However, standards also have competition – not just from big companies like Microsoft who sometimes choose not to follow them (or better, extend and embrace them). For example, Skype is the world’s largest VoIP network – and they don’t use SIP – at least not natively. And you can’t say that’s because they have a legacy application problem – they’re somewhat a new company dispite their size.

Some of the frustration that I always felt as part of my involvement in the standards process is that they move too slow. Slow on purpose, I understand. But sometimes, too slow for any good. Technology is evolving at a breakneck pace – and standards need to evolve on a more practical timeframe, not a timeframe that is suitable for a large research organization. The IETF is quite dramatically different than the W3C in this regard. While the W3C moves like a glacier, the IETF moves like a startup. IETF drafts expire every 6 months, forcing momentum. But causing lots of drafts that sometimes have not much change. On the other hand, how many different SIP extension drafts exist? A lot and that causes some fragmentation.

I don’t claim to have any answers or even plausible suggestions – even after 4 years of standards work. But, it needs to be examined.

To all the former employees of Vocalocity, you’ll always be near and dear to my heart for your hard work, dedication and friendship. I wish everyone the best of luck in the future and hope we can work together again. Please keep in touch.

Technorati Tags: vocalocity, zivva, voicexml, ccxml, sip, ietf, w3c, mrcp

It seems a number of people have blogged and more accurately, speculated, about what VoiceXML means to Microsoft and how it came to be. I’ve also seen some funny posts like “the Unveil acquisition prompted it”. I’m sure everyone has their opinion. Regardless of how it came to be, I’m happy to see Microsoft adopt another W3C standard like VoiceXML. VoiceXML has certainly received mass adoption with companies like Tellme, Nuance, Voxeo and IBM pushing it – just to scratch the surface. But I think the Microsoft adoption announcement really helps put VoiceXML into the mainstream – while SALT was interesting for a few minutes, VoiceXML really has the traction and maturity in the industry. I’ve been asked a lot lately more details about Vocalocity’s involvement. I’m restricted in what I can say and certainly what I can blog about … the Vocalocity press release explains a little bit of the story. Of course, a good bit is untold and you’ll have to wait and see.

The world’s greatest speech application has been destroyed.

OK, that’s an overly dramatic headline – but it’s partially true. I’m really disappointed that yes.com decided to change their incredible speech app, yes, to something overly unimpressive. Normally, a well designed VUI that uses DTMF is perfectly okay to me. However, I think yes proved that a well written speech application VUI can be very incredible. The newest version is sooo lame, it’s almost illegal. Why would anyone use this service now? These guys should just shut the service down at this point.

Fonality announces 20 million calls on Asterisk

Fonality today issued a press release saying that they had achieved 20 million calls on their Asterisk-based platform. Good for them. I think what Asterisk and companies like Fonality prove is that telephony sucks – and the world of telephony is all about good applications and not proprietary hardware and systems. I believe SMB customers are starving for simple, quality applications – even one’s that are non-speech enabled – at something cost affordable.

Voice2.0

However, the macro picture as I have preached about for 5 years is that the trend is moving from hardward boxes to smart software applications – and from proprietary to standards. People are simple sick of lock-in – but beyond that, the larger whole is increased as people mashup different technologies into compelling applications. We’re seeing this in Web2.0 all over the place every day. We’ve not really seen this in the Voice world yet – however, I think that it’s coming. I think the combination of Web2.0 and Voice2.0 is around the corner and Voice2.0 is going to be about replacing everyday communcation tasks with one’s which are based on standards and software – and as easy as Web2.0. Voice2.0 however is still some ways away in my opinion. Why? Goto a site like technorati and see how many people are blogging about VoiceXML, CCXML and MRCP. Very little. The fact that the blogosphere has not picked up on these standards I believe is quite telling. Now google asterisk or Skype. Entire business models and startup businesses (and large existing companies) have adopted these 2 technologies. Skype is probably the largest VoIP network in the world – but one based entirely on a proprietary implementation, not based on the widely adopted SIP protocol. Asterisk is based on SIP (among other protocols like ISDN) and is open source. Certainly both Skype and Asterisk are not in the same realm as VoiceXML and MRCP – and that’s part of the really interesting opportunity in my opinion. But they represent two incredibly successful businesses and technologies that have taken the communications world by storm overnight. I think more is coming that’s incredibly more compelling, and open.

SIP Servlets Specification TCK Woes

It seems like the new JSR-289 expert group has been formed for SIP Servlets 1.1 – but I really wish someone would fix the fact that the TCK site cannot be accessed anymore for JSR-116. I’ve emailed the JCP Board, JSR-116 spec lead and the JSR-116 mailing list over the past week and not one response to my requests to obtain the TCK. I think it’s very irresponsible for JCP (and Sun) to not have the TCK accessible based on what their license stipulates. How can one obtain conformance without access to the TCK?

Technorati Tags: voicexml, microsoft, speech, sip, servlet, asterisk, jsr116, jsr239, voxeo, tellme, fonality, voice2.0

Using state charts or modeling tools like UML aren’t really anything new – part of developing a VoiceXML, CCXML or SIP application these days is about managing and coordinate states. It’s not always fun, can be largely redundant and causes wicked, hard to find bugs in application development.

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group is working on a new programming language called State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction (SCXML) which is modeled after Harel State Charts. Jim Barnett of Aspect Software is the lead Editor and an extremely bright individual.

Lots of the core language of the VoiceXML FIA and the CCXML EHIA is largely driven by state. CCXML itself is really a state machine application. The VoiceXML application you typically would author is really no more than a finite state machine, at least at this point in the evolution of modern dialog systems. So, why SCXML and how is it affecting VXML and CCXML? SCXML is an attempt to refactor part of the common capabilities and requirements of the language into another language that is common and specific to this cause. A good reason to refactor. Also, VoiceXML 3.0 will have additional requirements and having an ability to mix CCXML and VoiceXML applications using a unified state representation allows better applications, more modular applications and applications which can focus on the domain rather than the form.

Enter a new (yet old) player in the area: AT&T and Call Advantage. They have years of experience working in the real world building a very complex SIP based system which is not your grandfather’s phone system. They have recently introduced the results of their research in a new project called echarts. What’s interesting here is that there is a lot to learn from their experience building highly state driven, very dynamic features in SIP. There system has allowed them to layer sophisticated feature interaction and do it in a way which scales in a large environment with many subscribers.

We should look at how we can leverage their work as part of SCXML.

I stumbled across AppFuse after finding a link on the WebWork site.

I digress. I worked on WebWork several years ago after Rick Oberg handed over some of the day to day management of WW to Matt Baldree, someone who worked for me awhile back. Matt is incredibly smart and back then was looking for something cool to work on. It’s been awhile since I’ve played around with it. Back then, I did some VoiceXML extensions to WW.

Fast forward. Tonight, I bought the Manning book on WW by Patrick Lightbody and Jason Carreira. I haven’t read it yet, just a skim, but they’ve done a good job of highlighting why WW is a good framework: it’s simple to use. App Fuse makes it even easier to build a skeleton site, fast. Not just a simple website, one with Hibernate, Spring and Webwork (including Clickstream and SiteMesh for templates/skins).

Move over RoR, enter App Fuse.

Simple steps:

• Download App Fuse.
• execute: ant new
• enter your site name
• cd into the site directory
• edit properties.xml and enter your Database Connection info like username/password
• execute: ant setup test-all
• NOTE: if the mail test fails, edit web/WEB-INF/classes/mail.properties
• execute: ant setup-tomcat deploy
• start Tomcat
• execute: ant test-canoo -Dtestcase=Login
• Open http://localhost:8080/appname (mine was http://localhost:8088/jeff)
• Done. Full website skeleton built on top of WW+Spring+Hibernate!!