anyone else get notification??

I’ve had a development account for quite a while, but just played with it – never developed anything real. But recently I decided I want to stop paying for my home landline, so got the idea to port my number (which is tied to many accounts) to Tropo. As I was working on creating a simple app to forward to my cell, the Tropo-supplied number stopped working – getting a busy signal. Dropped that number and got a new one – still getting busy. Guess I now what’s going on. Nothing communicated from Tropo about it.

It’s a shame, because from what I’ve seen Tropo’s APIs are more capable than the other platforms I’ve looked at, and I really like their Groovy scripting support.

For example, Twilio has 3 voices – male, female, and “alice”. Here are just the *English* language voices Tropo supports:

def voices = [
[‘Karen’, ‘Austrailian’],
[‘Lee’, ‘Austrailian’],
[‘Veena’, ‘Indian’],
[‘Moira’, ‘Irish’],
[‘Fiona’, ‘Scottish’],
[‘Tessa’, ‘South African’],
[‘Kate’, ‘UK’],
[‘Serena’, ‘UK’],
[‘Daniel’, ‘UK’]
[‘Oliver’, ‘UK’],
[‘Allison’, ‘USA’],
[‘Ava’, ‘USA’],
[‘Evelyn’, ‘USA’],
[‘Samantha’, ‘USA’],
[‘Susan’, ‘USA’],
[‘Zoe’, ‘USA’],
[‘Tom’, ‘USA’],
[‘Victor’, ‘USA’]
]
voices.each { v ->
say(“Hello, how are you today? My name is ${v[0]} and I speak {v[1]} English.”, [voice: v[0]])
}

Another nice feature is voice recognition. Most platforms will let you build an IVR that accepts DTMF input, but Tropo’s will let you do things like this:

def theVoice = ‘Daniel’
ask(“What color dress do you want? Choose from black, red, blue or green.”, [
choices: “black, red, blue, green”,
timeout: 10.0,
onChoice: { event ->
say(“Then you should get a $event.value dress! I’ll text you a link.”, [voice: theVoice])
},
onBadChoice: { event ->
say(“I didn’t understand.”, [voice: theVoice])
},
voice: theVoice
])

Can anybody recommend a platform that supports voice recognition (preferably without having to integrate with AWS lex) and has robust yet easy to use APIs in many programming languages?

Bernard,

Thanks. True Voice is already a part of my report.

I completely agree with the trend towards webRTC and APIs disrupting traditional UCaaS.

I would like to point out an update to a company covered in your report. It is about a legitimate alternative to Tropo called Voxeet True Voice. Voxeet delivers high quality spatial sound, HD video and encryption and its API platform illustrates the point you are making in this post.

Voxeet was already a Gartner Cool Vendor
and it was named the 2017 Hot Vendor for Unified Communications and Collaboration by Aragon Research on the very same day you published your post (June 26).

I hope that helps!
More on the Voxeet API SDK

Well…

3 unsolicited comments. On the same article. In favor of the same company. From 3 different people. Who are first time commentators.

Call me a skeptic.

Anyway, thanks for sharing.

I do not work for the company and I was not solicited to make this post… I just know the pain of investing years of development into a platform then a big company pulls the rug out from under you (TI Speech Development). We picked Aculab after a path of three other companies, we had beein a Dialogic customer for year and it was great until Intel bought them and well think Tropo/Cisco and you know why we ended up at Aculab. Best business platform/company decision we have made.

Igor,

I get the feeling we’re not reading the map the same way.

Open source is great, but it is no business model.

Based on your train of thought, there’s no room for AWS either, because AWS isn’t open source. Somehow… I don’t think it holds water.

UCaaS and CPaaS both fill a real need in the market. And it is one about managed solutions around communications.