One of the often-mentioned advantages of IVR Toolkit like VBVoice, Velocity etc. are its quick implementation of IVR system. To be more precise, implement the IVR call flow quickly with minimum requirement of coding!

While this is quite true that IVR Toolkit removes the requirement of coding the mundane subroutines interfacing the CTI boards, but question arises, is this advantage exclusively belong to IVR Tool-kits only ? I think otherwise! This advantage is equally shared by hard core C or C++ coding from old-school of IVR development!

IVR Tool-kits in a way can be considered modern day compact point and shoot digital cameras where anyone capable of pressing the shutter button can take beautiful pictures! And the learning curve to take picture consists of just three steps :

1. Insert batteries and switch on the camera
2. Point to the object and see the on the LCD screen
3. Press shutter button and look at the captured picture on LCD screen!

Rest of the things would be like aperture, shutter speed, ISO would be taken care by the camera itself! Similarly, with IVR Toolkit, just install the toolkit in your development tool like Microsoft Visual Studio, drag and drop the ‘IVR Controls’ to ‘define’ call flow your IVR and then compile and run! The IVR would be ready!

Now think of DSLRs or old SLR cameras which is used by professional photographers which offer them controls on Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO as well as many other parameters to control light for a better picture! This breed of photographers still stick to SLR cameras precisely because of the controls over those aperture, shutter speed, ISO etc. !

Similarly, old school IVR development, IVR coders have control over CTI boards completely without depending on any third party tools! They have direct access to APIs those control all telephony related functions like sensing incoming call, ISDN PRI command exchange and much more!

And as for the quick implementation of call flow, they can implement fast too, simply exploiting another old school technique called ‘re-usable code’. Over the years, C++ programmers have also developed their re-usable code for controlling all basic CTI functions which they can use in any new IVR applications. The call flow of an IVR is nothing but a smart switch structure which does fixed set of tasks like playing audio file, detecting DTMF or speech recognition, connect call or disconnect calls!

And there is a time tested, excellent tool for re-using code which is widely known as “Copy-Paste”, just copy the code of subroutines or functions ( which control the CTI board) and paste them in your new project with new call flow and you are done!

So, the quick implementation of any IVR call flow is also possible by seasoned and experienced C++ IVR developers. But, for a beginner, most probably, IVR Tool kit is the best option to develop their IVR Systems in quickest possible time provided they already know some development tool supported by the IVR Tool kit. FOr example, if some one know C# or Microsoft .NET, one can easily build IVR application using Velocity or VBVoice.

Glorsoft Limited, a young up and coming Irish Software company today announced that its Voice Application Development middleware, Velocity v3.0, was selected for the Best Development Tool award at the Internet Telephony EXPO exhibition and conference at the Miami Beach

GlorSoft - Velocity 3.0 .NET IVR Dev Tool

ITEXPO, produced by Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), is the world’s largest and best-attended IP Communications trade show, drawing an average attendance of 7,000 buyers and sellers of IP Communications products and services.

Glorsoft, an Enterprise Ireland supported High Potential Startup (HPSU), is a Dublin based developer of interactive voice response (IVR) and speech-based application programming tools. The company has been actively building a global developer community with its Velocity software development kit (SDK) and travelled to Miami last week to exhibit at the ITEXPO.

“This week in Miami we’ve set new standards across the board – from our conference content, to the quality of the products and solutions on our expo floor, and this year’s Best-of-Show winners deserve recognition for differentiating themselves from a large and highly competitive field,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO and conference chairman for TMC. “We’re pleased to honor the “best-of-show” winners, and we thank them for sharing their innovative solutions with the communications and technology community at ITEXPO.”

Commenting on the award, Tim Farrelly, Managing Director of Glorsoft, stated “we are delighted that our Velocity product has been recognised on the international stage. We always believed we had a World class product and the feedback from the attendees at the show has been excellent. We look forward to building our partner and developer community and would like to thank our existing users who have contributed to our success to-date.”

Velocity v3.0 is used by application developers to build automated voice and speech based solutions. It is an open, standards-based platform which integrates tightly with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 and numerous MRCP based Speech Recognition engines. As a .NET based technology, Velocity makes telephony programming more accessible to the global developer community. Velocity based solutions are presently deployed in Ireland, UK, USA, Canada and New Zealand with many more projects in the pipeline.

The Velocity SDK can be downloaded for free at www.glorsoft.com

Further Information -:

Anne Marie Moran, Glorsoft Limited
3300 Lake Drive, Citywest Business Campus, Dublin 24
Telephone 01-6877000
Annemarie@glorsoft.com

Today on 23rd August, ivrsworld.com has turned two years old!

I would like to thank all readers and their valuable comments on this blog. When I started writing this blog two years back, I simply wanted to keep posting about information about IVR that I Google in internet, various IVR related news, my personal experiences with various IVR projects. But I think it has now become a blog about IVR!

IVR Visitor

The turning point came somewhere December 2009, when this blog had started getting more than 100 unique visitors per day and I thought I should take it seriously ( presently, the latest figures in Google analytic shows 4400 unique visitors a month, majorly from India, USA, Canada and Europe). It felt good when this blog is shows up at first page in Google while searching for many IVR related keywords! The registered readers ( Google Feedburner) of the blog has reached 100 with email IDs ending with dialogic.com, sangoma.com, pronexus.com, invox.com, aculab.com to name few! These were surely inspiring!

Then VBVoice, IVR toolkit for .NET developers came as sponsor which was moral booster! Otherwise I was majorly using Google Adsense to display graphics, not to earn anything!

Then MessageTech, the hosted IVR Service provider has come to sponsor and I even could afford a paid WordPress Theme for the blog.

I thank you all the sponsors for sponsoring this IVR blog which were really helpful and inspiring. I hope to have one more sponsor this year so that I could host www.ivrsworld.com on VPS/dedicated server with minimum down time . Presently it is on a shared hosting and I have been embarrassed few times when readers mailed me to inform they were not able to open the site.

I thought I would prepare a PDF book in the second year, unfortunately I could not not achieve that, but this year, I will again try to achieve that. Other wise, I think, ivrsworld.com has had a good year!

This year, I would test more CTI boards, IVR RAD tools and post my experience here. And at the end of year, I would like to prepare a comparison chart using some common parameters.

I have been thinking to prepare a list of RAD(Rapid Application Development) tools for developing IVR software or voice applications for long time. I have found 8 RAD tools ( including one free tool) for developing IVR Application so far and I think there may be more as I am quite sure, many IVR RAD Tool companies do not use SEO techniques to rank high in search engines! Or may be, Google does not know everything on net, after all.

I have tested only one among this list of 8 tools, VBVoice 5.6.1 of PRONEXUS, and I must admit, I am impressed with how they have made developing IVR software easy and quick! And I am sure pride of many people will be dented as who were member of exclusive and minority group of IVR developer using native API of CTI boards, including myself. I hope to download evaluation version of all the tools one day and compare all of them.

I would say, not all in this list of eight RAD Tools for developing IVR software may qualify to be called complete rapid application development tools, and here is the list:-

1. VBVoice 5.6.1 from PRONEXUS INC:-
I think this is the biggest RAD tool for IVR Software development. Very powerful, easy to use tool that uses industry standard programming environment like .NET technology. It has support for large speech and telephony technologies like ACD, SIP, HMP, MRCP, ASR, TTS and VoIP. If anyone knows VB.NET, C# then with this VBVoice 5.6.1, he can become an IVR Application developer overnight. They support high end CTI boards of Dialogic as well as other CTI boards from vendors like Donjin.

2. VoiceGuide by Katalina Technologies
Another powerful RAD tool for developing IVR. It has its own script and visual editor to write IVR Call flow. It has support for Microsoft SAPI. I feel this is a good tool to start with IVR application. They claim to have more than 5000 clients in their website.

3. Envox 7 from Envox Group
This is another big RAD tools for not only IVR Application, but for many more! It supports IP Telephony, Video Messaging and SMS! One of the key feature of this tool is support for VoiceXML, CCXML and Web Services. It has its own graphical programming environment Envox Studio. It gives good flexibility for developers to develop wide range of voice and IVR applications, most probably ideal for call center solutions. Supports wide range of CTI hardware.

4. Velocity 2.0 by Glorsoft Limited
New kid on the block! “Velocity™ is a completely new technology created by .NET developers for .NET developers.”, It is a new tool, but looks very promising. They support wide range of Dialogic CTI Boards. They have already got prestigious client like London Underground.

5. Xtend IVR 3.0 by Xtend Technologies (P) Ltd
Indian competitor in the field of IVR RAD development tool. This toolkit can be used in various programming languages like VB,VC++, C# etc. They also support speech technologies as well as CTI boards from multiple vendors. They also have a large clientele in India. Free tool for one channel IVR can be downloaded from their website.

6. CT Developer Studio 2 by Pingram Software
CT Developer Studio 2 is a Windows software that helps you quickly implement a professional voice response system into your business. Developing IVR solutions is easy with Visual IVR Script Designer and the many ready-to-use samples supplied with the product. They have their own script, visual script programming environment and simulator. They support Ai-LOgix, NMS and Dialogic boards.

7. Eurovoice objects version 2.0 by Eurovoice Ltd.
They provide COM interface to VB6, VB.net and C# programs for voice or IVR functionality. They mainly support PIKA CTI boards. But they also support PCI express boards from Dalogic. They have speech recognition through MRCP.

8. AGE (Application Generation Environment) version 2.1. by CompTek Internations
AGE is the fastest and easiest way to build voice applications. Best part is, it is completely free, but they charge you for runtime components. It supports Dialogic Voice boards. I think it may not be suitable for large IVR Applications.

I think I would give my top two ranks to VBVoice, Envox 7. Velocity 2.0 is the product to watch out for.