Prophecy 2006

Just as an FYI to all Prophecy users: pay attention to Voxeo's web site tommorow; they're about to announce some very interesting news about new versions of Prophecy.

"Software rot" is a term I made up years ago; if you leave software unused for six months and attempt to run it, the software almost inevitably fails. There's no known cure other than rigorous control over every piece of hardware and software and all the networking that ties them together. (In other words, there's no known cure.)

I've just tried to run a program on the premises and hosted versions of Prophecy, and ended up fighting software rot for hours and hours. Most of the problems stemmed from configurations: the Avahi DNS service, the /etc/hosts file, and similar rigamarole. I also had to be reminded by Voxeo support that the software, written years ago, was in Voxeo's early version of the CCXML language and not in the W3 1.0 release. Another reason to use DOCTYPE when it's available, I suppose.

However, I did stumble across an odd and subtle problem. In the past, the result of a CCXML.start was a "success" returned by the server. Now the result of a CCXML.start is a "success" and a carriage return. I don't know if that's because of a change in Prophecy, in the underlying parsing software that I use (Python), or something else — but it's another reminder to check your strings carefully and strip off unnecessary whitespace.

Part two of the two-part CCXML workshop is now online. Download to your computer and play it using Quicktime or Totem.

Dan York of Voxeo interviewed me about the Phone 2 Directions project.

I've noticed, once again, a rather pesky error that can show up in SRGS grammar files on Prophecy.

In an SRGS file, the top line in in the file is the xml declaration, and the next line in the file is the grammar element.

If the very next line is a comment, the grammar file will experience problems.

For example, I was debugging today and accidentally put a comment right after the grammar element. As a result, the grammar file would not return any interpretations. That is, if I set

To avoid this problem, put one blank line between the grammar element and the first comment.

I vaguely recall having other problems with comments in SRGS grammar files; if there are other elements or XML-related declerations at the top, the comments come afterwards. E.g., if there's a DOCTYPE declaration, you may have trouble if you place a comment between it and the grammar element. I recommend that you put comments after all top-of-file elements and declarations, just to be safe.

I ran across an odd error in my log yesterday, and I could not make heads or tails of it:
SyntaxError: syntax error : ccxml. = 0;
As you might imagine, I certainly did not have <var name="ccxml." expr="0"/> anywhere in my code.

After writing Voxeo for help, I found the error simultaneously with their response. In my code, I found:
<var name="" expr="0"/>
Leaving the name of the variable blank causes the error. Of course, it does raise interesting questions about how to use this mysterious "ccxml" variable in other places in the code...

As of this morning, sending outbound DTMF isn't working well on Prophecy 8 and BusinesVoIP. If you run into this problem, try lengthening the DTMF signal duration; I've used 150ms successfully.

Business VoIP outbound dialing is up and running on version 8; and with the able assistance of Voxeo's CTO, it even does toll-free numbers correctly and consistently.

Now if I could just figure out why my previously-functioning ASR is not working... something has changed, have I missed a transition?... stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode.

The title says it all, but skips lightly over the hours of work spent trying to find out why BusinessVoIP wasn't making outbound calls...

If you have an Evolution account — you do, right? — here's something fantastic. Bring up your list of hosted applications, and click on one of them.

Notice that the window now has tabs?

Click on call routing. If you have installed Prophecy 8, you will find your personal servers listed here. You can now choose to route all calls into your servers; you can route all calls into Voxeo's hosted platform; or you can overflow/ailover from your servers onto Voxeo's platform.

That's a really fantastic capability.