Prophecy 2006

I'm still interested in a gathering at SpeechTek, for an hour or so, to meet fellow developers to network and share insights, experiences, and other (possibly profitable) ideas. Oh, and I think it's likely that at least some Voxeo people we'd all like to meet would turn up at the meeting.

I propose Tuesday evening, August 8th. I personally prefer the 7:45 PM time slot, but I'm just one vote.

I've posted a new poll. The idea is to meet either just before or just after the evening event. I'm assuming that a lunchtime meeting won't work.

The SVN (not CVS or package) version of Voice Conference Manager for P2006 now supports both "mute" and "drop" functions. That is, if you monitor a conference call via the VCM web page, you can hit a "mute" button to get a particular leg muted.

This capability is very much pre-alpha, if nothing else because the web page is cranky and there's some sort of issue with unjoin/join in build 126. When the capabilty gets to alpha I'll release it as an update to both the vcm-p2006 and the push2web packages.

The cache problem isn't in Prophecy; it's in Firefox on Linux. I have to physcially go in and remove the applets from two different places if I want clean copies of the applets, which is just plain ridiculous.

I expect frustration will drive me to find a better workaround sometime soon.

I'm pretty certain that there's a cache control problem on the Prophecy WWW server on port 9990. I've done just about everything I can to get the cache purged, both on the client side and the server side, and even rebooting the Prophecy server, but I seem to keep picking up the same copies of the old Java class files I'm loading into an applet.

Odd. Details when they become available.

I'm working on improving Voice Conference Manager, and while I've done a little testing of build 126, I've not played around with it much.

Any comments from anyone on how well it's working?

I am moderating a session at SpeechTek about Open Source and/or free tools for speech technology developers. I'd like to create a comprehensive list of all such tools to present at the conference.

If you have a tool you'd like to list, either add a comment to this blog entry or send me email.

I recommend reading this article on the real-world difficulties of CCXML, Linux, Open Source, and running a call center.

A while back I pointed out that, according to this article, Prophecy 2006 was the only CCXML 1.0 interpreter that fully met the CCXML 1.0 specification.

Since that time, I've received email — from high up the food chain — that the topic deserves a more balanced approach:

• Fifteen companies are certified as CCXML compliant.
• Voxeo is the only company that complies with all the optional compliance items.
• "Optional" means just that: optional.

The latest build of Voice Conference Manager is available for download from the project web site.

This version supports web-based monitoring of conference calls via the "push2web" servlet, also avaiable for download. As the call progresses, the web page monitors progress in real time.

I've just released "push2web," a servlet that runs on P2006. Not only does this code illustrate how to implement Java servlets on a P2006 server, it also provides a valuable service: it lets you tie a CCXML or VoiceXML application to an external web page. As the CCXML/VoiceXML call progresses, you send HTTP to the servlet; the servlet then *pushes* information to a customer's browser. Result: the customer can monitor, in real time, the progress of a call.

This was created for Voice Conference Manager, and I'm about to incorporate this capability, which is available on the Voxeo non-P2006 version, into the P2006 version.