Prophecy 2006

If you're trying to set up your Business VoIP account from Voxeo, and the calls don't ever make it to the application, here's something to try: on the Voxeo Management console for VoIP, check the "Provider Requires Bridged Connections" checkbox.

As far as I can tell so far, you can't direct your call to a particular app; it's the default app or nothing.

Actually, when I try to direct the call to the Voxeo's default app, it fails, and I suspect that's because the platform attempts and fails to hand off the call to my app. In the meantime, until I've done more research, just make your app the default app.

The log is very much improved in the latest version.

The log offers easy-to-create "filters" that let you see only specific log entries. This was available before, but it has an improved interface.

The new search function is also rather nice. You can hit "find all" and the log will highlight all occurences of the search phrase. This makes it easy to see every occurence in the log just by scrolling, a very nice time-saver.

Ok, chalk this one up to user error, but with a comment about the inner workings of Prophecy.

I had a "catch" element to catch "connection.disconnect" events, and that catch element had a semantic error in it (a bad "assign" element). Therefore when I hit a "disconnect" element in the VoiceXML script, the catch element would trigger and processing would halt.

This is both reasonable and unreasonable. Reasonable because the error in the catch element caused the interpreter to halt. Unreasonable because the disconnect element should order a disconnect, and the connection.disconnect is the event that follows a disconnect.

My question to Voxeo, which I've asked support: How could it be that the connection.disconnect is received before the event actually completes and the SIP phone disconnects? Or does connection.disconnect.hangup work as I've just said, but a connection.disconnect event has some different meaning?

I'll post the conclusion to this exciting dialog as information becomes available.

I'll be on to Voxeo soon, but if anyone has done some testing on sensitivity to non-speech input, I'd be interested.

I'm using a close-talk mike, and I'm finding that <record> elements latch onto breathing; so even if I'm silent, the system picks that up as my response.

I'm also still fairly certain the timeout timers do start early, before the end of the announcements even if bargein is set to false, but I need more testing to be certain.

I haven't had occassion to fiddle with the timeouts on Propehcy before this week. I'm in the middle of an interesting project and I wanted to try some ideas.

The first problem is with the VoiceXML spec itself, which does not allow parameterization of timeouts. That is, a "record" with an attribute of "silencetimeout" takes the value "750ms", but you can't put a parameter in its place. That's annoying, but I can work around that by using PHP. (And I'm embarrased to admit that I completely forgot that the spec was written that way.)

But after that I entered the platform issues, and I've been having a bit of trouble. I can't tell without more digging, but it seems that timeouts start earlier than I'd expect. That is, if I set an initial half-second timeout, it's over well before I can possibly say anything. I have been wondering if the timeout counter starts during the prompt; I'll be doing experiemnts to see what happens.

If anyone has comments about how well timeouts work on Prophecy, and tips/tricks for optimizing perfomance, I'd be obliged.

I've released a new version of push2web, which supports both mute and unmute.

You can download it by visiting the Voice Conference Manager web site.

The latest "GA" download of Prophecy, Prophecy 7, has a fix for the join/unjoin problem.

As a result, the "mute" function for Voice Conference Manager works correctly.

Unfortunately, VCM doesn't yet support "unmute," but I should have that working in short order.

Well, folks, I'm back from SpeechTek and the marvels of the Catskill Mountains.

Here's a request: Would someone please provide a tutorial on how to integrate non-Voxeo ASR and/or TTS using MRCP? I know it can be done, but as I haven't done it, it'd be nice if someone could provide a tutorial that helps avoid the "gotchas."

If you need a login on this system to provide it, or if you have a login and need help using the system, please contact me directly.

The GA — General Availability — version of Prophecy is now available for download.

Voice Conference Manager is automatically installed as part of the GA download.

Voxeo just announced RocketSource, a consortium that will promote open source applications on the Voxeo platform.

I'm pleased to say that Voice Conference Manager is one of the first applications to be part of RocketSource.