CloudVox goes public today, and from where I sit, the games have begun. CloudVox is a service from a company lead by nice guy Troy Davis that solves a fundamental problem: connect up my voice application to the PSTN. Without CloudVox, you would have to take your wonderful adhearsion application and install it into a physical server somewhere in the network, then install asterisk, then configure the dial plan to point at your application, then get some PSTN connectivity from somebody, then integrate it and test it. With CloudVox, I simply create a new service, point it at my adhearsion appplication, then I’m done. I’m calling it from any phone, and it’s running my app. Whamo. I officially declare CloudVox as the first out of the gate.
What’s supported?
- Native language bindings in Java, Ruby, Perl, C#, Python
- Call flow lives with your code, data, and state (Rails, J2EE, Django, Catalyst, others)
- Functionality in a few lines, not a few weeks
- Up and running in seconds
- No long-term commitment
- Capacity ready as volume grows
- Full power of Asterisk, AGI, and open source APIs
- Optimized, tweaked, tested, and documented
- Every app has traditional and SIP phone numbers
- Lightweight plain text TCP connection, not raw audio
- Text-to-speech with industry-leading voices
- Kick off a conference call, controlled by your app
- Call recording, DTMF menu navigation, MP3 playback
I’ve already kicked off an app to these guys, loaded it onto an Amazon EC2 server, and got it talking in less than 60 minutes to any PSTN phone.
Now, here’s my new issue. A lot of my voice mashup work was done with Ruby and Adhearsion, but the problem was that it always lives in a box behind a firewall. When I had to stick my application outside the firewall, I had to write Ruby and integrate it into VoiceXML from Voxeo, or pick an API from somebody like Jaduka or IfByPhone. Now I have to rethink all that stuff. Damn you, Troy, for making me think. I don’t like to think… it’s unnatural.
Hi Thomas,
I’m a fledgling VoIP entrepreneur and I’m still wrapping my mind around all the different aspects of the technology and business of voice enabled business processes.
This post touches on a question I’ve had for a while:
> A lot of my voice mashup work was done
> with Ruby and Adhearsion, but the problem
> was that it always lives in a box behind a
> firewall. When I had to stick my
> application outside the firewall, I had
> to write Ruby and integrate it into
> VoiceXML from Voxeo…
I’m really curious to hear more about that. Why pay Voxeo 10-15 cents per minute instead of building my apps on top of Asterisk/Adhearsion for a fraction of that?
Sure, a platform like Voxeo will scale without extra work, but when the time comes, wouldn’t the effort put into scaling with Asterisk/Adhearsion pay off?
Or, is the straight “Asterisk/Adhearsion” approach nice in theory but a just not workable in a production environment with lots of users?
Anyway, maybe CloudVox will make the question irrelevant anyway. It certainly sounds compelling. Hopefully, they’ll open it up soon so I can check it out.
This sounded exciting. I went to the site on July 22 as soon as I read the blog post and put in my email address. Haven’t heard a peep since. Tried a note on the feedback page several days later. Still nothing. Are they really ready for prime time?
Hi Mike,
First off, let me apologize for the crossed wires. I just double-checked our procmail filters and ticketing system, and only found the list request. To that end, you’ll have an email in the next 2 hours with access. I’d be happy to troubleshoot further
In any case, I really appreciate your interest. Cloudvox is squarely in production, and already serves many live apps. I’d love to see what you can mix in.
Troy
Scotty, good question. We want to make open phone APIs easier to adopt, and specifically remove two barriers: the barrier to getting started, and the barrier to production-izing an app (for the public or an internal audience). We’re developers, so we built it on the platforms we want to use.
As Thomas says, voice really is the paprika – everything tastes better with it. The overhead to add that “last 10%” paprika is just too high.
I did a presentation yesterday at Ruby Hoedown that went over a couple prototype apps that show just a bit of what’s possible. Here’s a few to play with:
http://github.com/eric/phoenix_status
http://github.com/eric/voter
http://gist.github.com/4670
Note that you’re getting a sneak peek; the numbers mentioned might be intermittently down as we add to the apps.
It shows what I’m talking about, though: the barrier to having something callable is now very close to zero.
Troy
Interesting — looks like another startup that’s presenting at Seattle Tech Startups, Twilio (www.twilio.com) — am sure there will be a ton of these in coming weeks/months/years!
I didnt get a response after — about a two week wait either — Love to get a beta invite.
Just an update that Cloudvox has been public for a few months now, and live for almost a year. We tried to make the most practical, stable, open environment for API-driven phone calls.
You can use Adhearsion, Asterisk-Java, PHPAGI, HTTP & JSON, or any other common open-source library for Asterisk. We’ve documented how to do stuff like conferences, find-me-follow-me, and voicemail.
http://cloudvox.com/ and http://help.cloudvox.com/ have lots more, and you can sign up for free. I’d love feedback.