Prophecy 2006

Voxeo's Tropo service, which provides telephone calls and interaction with the caller for only $0.03 per minute, currently offers a slew of programming languages, including my two current favorites (Python and Ruby). I've written about this service previously.

Voxeo announced today — or if you're reading this early in the morning, will shortly announce — a COBOL interface for Tropo. Although COBOL is, to say the least, an outmoded programming language, it's still the language used by many large companies such as utilities and manufacturers — remember the scramble to hire COBOL programmers in late 1999? Those programmers were hired by huge corporations that have millions of customers, companies that need to automate their customer interactions to pare costs.

With a COBOL interface, Voxeo can reach a large number of companies that have massive investments in COBOL. These companies can automate their customer service operations by simple modifications to their current software (instead of impossibly expensive re-writes of current software or costly interfaces to separate software).

Voxeo's Dan York posted a video explaining the reasoning behind the interface.

EDIT: Demo code available here.

Voxeo can deploy new languages easily because of their acquisition last year of Micromethods, which provides the underlying technology. There's already rumors that next year at this time we can expect additional languages. I'm told that unless there's more community interest, a Forth interface is unlikely; however, in recognition of Voxeo's original deployment platform on Windows, we can expect Visual Basic and possibly Excel spreadsheet macros.