World's Coolest Free Desktop VoiceXML Dev. Tooling (Voxeo Does it Again!!)

Once again spkydog assures you that those guys at Voxeo are seriously on the cutting edge! If authoring VoiceXML content is your bread and butter, this is likely the announcement you've been waiting years for... Voxeo just made a sneak preview of their new beta Prophecy 2006 tools, available for free download.

So what's Prophecy 2006? Well, free online VoiceXML development studios such as Tellme, Voxeo, etc., have been around for quite a while and thousands of developers depend on them. This meat and potatoes kind of stuff for VoiceXML developers, necessary but not real exciting. There is a good reason this hosting model for VoiceXML emerged in the industry. Speech resources and telephony interfaces (hardware and software) are typically costly and complex to install, configure, maintain, etc. So most developers simply let smart guys like those at Voxeo and Tellme take care of the gory details and simply sit at their desks and hack up web apps that serve up VoiceXML markup, and use their softphones (or toll free calls over PSTN) to test their apps hosted on one of these online developer studios. This was actually key motivation behind VoiceXML to begin with, i.e. make IVR apps as portable and easy to develop as web apps.

So getting back to Prophecy 2006, what tons of developers have been looking for for is a simple free download that lets them get a 1-2 port VoiceXML server up and running on their desktop without any special telephony hardware, and no need to buy speech ports from Nuance at thousands of dollars a pop. Some years ago, Motorola released the first such free tool kit (MADK) but it only supported a VoiceXML predecesser VoxML (and maybe an early flavor of VoiceXML) and had a rather flakey interface based on the Microsoft Agent technology. Since then, similar tools have appeared, but they are either very expensive, or very limited (no real speech resources, just simulated textual input/output).

Voxeo's Prophecy platform is what you've been waiting for - a complete fully functional 2 port VoiceXML platform and softphone running on your desktop - all available for free download. If you need more ports, Voxeo indicates they will have very low cost turnkey solutions available.

The Prophecy beta comes in two flavors, with a TTS engine (and a very sweet sounding one at that!) or without. I tried the "without" version first but seemed to have problems getting it going with the MSFT SAPI TTS engine. I then grabbed the "TTS included" version and less than 3 minutes after the download completed (not bad, 300MB or so) I was happily talking to my very own VoiceXML interpreter. It worked like a charm, right out of the box. This is actually the key point here. With Prophecy, Voxeo has substantially lowered the bar when it comes to running your own local VoiceXML platform, from both the technical and economic perspective. The closest you could of gotten to this in the past is to either buy a turnkey system (not cheap) or try to assemble your own from the various open source components that are available (Open VXI, etc.) This is truly an industry first, and one that will without doubt stir up a lot of interest among the VoiceXML developer community.

In addition to the 100% conforming VoiceXML interpreter (the legendary Motorola VoxGateway), Prophecy includes support for CCXML and an app server with PSP, JSP and servlets. And, it probably goes without saying, Voxeo will be more than happy to host those cool apps you develop with Prophecy when the masses start to dial in, or sell you a nice say to use turnkey solution for your enterprise.

Don't look any further, download your copy now: http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy2006/, and spread the word!