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What Matters in Cloud Telephony

Posted by Mark Headd under News, Standards, Tropo, VoIP

The landscape of cloud telephony continues to change.

I was heartened this week to see some of the sharpest minds I know in cloud telephony and unified communications get together with the acquisition of Teleku by Voxeo. Teleku and Voxeo’s Tropo service are complimentary ones that offer lots of goodies for developers, and I’m anxious to see what these guys will be cooking up now that they have joined forces. Congrats to all involved!

While there is lots of discussion about what this acquisition means for the constantly changing landscape of cloud telephony, this move validates (in my mind) some of the important trends that will determine which cloud telephony companies will be around for the long-term and how developers will use their services.

None of this is new - I’ve said it all before. It is worth noting, however, that all of the trends that I’ve observed before that are going to make the difference in the cloud telephony space are ones that both Tropo and Teleku do very well.

Portability - underscored not only by Teleku’s support for the open standard VoiceXML, but also the Tropo crew’s involvement in the Asterisk world, and the defacto standard for building Asterisk apps in Ruby - Adhearsion.

SIP integration - remember this kids: true cloud telephony has SIP baked in - the rest is just marketing fluff. Both Tropo and Teleku support SIP interoperability and make it very easy for developers to use SIP as part of their applications.

Multi-channel / multi-modality - Both Tropo and Teleku have big multi-modal chops. Being able to interact with users on multiple communication channels from one code base is a key tenet of unified communications and cloud telephony, and this will become increasingly important in the future.

Speech recognition - cloud telephony isn’t your grandfather’s way to build a phone app, so why should users be restricted to their grandfather’s way of interacting with a phone app? Speech recognition is fully supported in both Tropo and Teleku, and this will matter more and more to cloud telephony developers going forward.

So if you’re wondering what the next change in the cloud telephony landscape will be, you can bet that one of these trends will dictate the change.

Until then, I’ll be hacking on some cloud-based, speech rec enabled UC apps.

Open311 Goes Big Time

Posted by Mark Headd under Open Government, Open Source, Standards

This was a big week for the Open311 initiative. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra joined Gov 2.0 rock star Mayor Gavin Newsom from the City of San Francisco to announce a national initiative to adopt a common standard for a 311 API.

The number of supporters for the initiative is growing, and I think it’s high time that developers started getting in on the act.

There isn’t a publicly available sandbox (that I am aware of) for developers to use to develop Open311 applications. The Open311 website, however, has some detailed information on the API standard as well as some sample XML responses that the API will provide.

Based on this information, I’ve started working on a set of PHP classes for interacting with the Open311 API. It’s still rough, and it will obviously undergo many changes as more information on the API is developed, and public test infrastructure is set up.

Still, its a start (and it was fun to write!) - I’m hopeful that others will help develop this set of classes. Hit me up at mheadd [at] voiceingov.org if interested.

Coming Full Circle on 311

Posted by Mark Headd under Open Government, Open Source, Standards

Tomorrow in New York City, developers, project managers, public policy specialists and others will come together to discuss an open standard specification for 311 services. One of the primary motivators for this discussion is the work that has been done by the District of Columbia which has deployed an open API for reporting 311 requests.

The idea behind the Open311 project is that both citizens and government are better served by having a uniform standard for 311 API’s like the District of Columbia. An open standard will better facilitate the development of applications and services that make submitting 311 requests easier and more convenient for citizens, and more cost effective for governments. From the Open311 website:

Open311 is not meant to refer to a specific app or any one incarnation of 311 services. Instead Open311 intends to be a specification of an open platform for 311 services…Once this core standard is defined, new user interfaces and custom workflows can be created by anyone and shared between cities to provide distributed innovation.

To help understand where 311 service may go because of efforts like Open311, or even more independent efforts to deploy 311 APIs, it helps to understand how 311 services operate today.

311 Today

Most municipal 311 services are centered around a call center operation. The call center is staffed with personnel that a citizen can speak with to report an issue. 311 Call center personnel are trained and typically have a predefined script that they use when interacting with a caller. This script ensures that they collect all required information from the caller and enter it into the 311 system.

Like many call centers, 311 centers may utilize some limited routing logic or an ACD to send a citizen to a specific agent or group of agents based on the issue they want to report. Also, like most call enters, the largest cost component (or certainly one of the big ones) is likely to be labor costs. There are other costs worth noting as well, some of them borne by citizens - like the cost of waiting in queue when all agents are occupied with other callers.

Interestingly, if you look at some of the details of the responses from the DC 311 API, you can see the call center roots of this service pretty clearly.

This is the response from the DC 311 API for the abandoned bicycle service type. You can see that this response shows many of the elements you would expect to see in a call center script, including prompts and the characteristics of the data entry fields the agent would use.

311 Tomorrow?

By deploying a 311 API, municipalities can encourage the development of new applications and different interfaces for submitting 311 service requests. This benefits citizens because there will potentially be more options to use when they need to contact 311. It can benefit governments because it can facilitate the submission of 311 requests without the need for one of the most cont-intensive components - 311 operators. Governments might also benefit from better information when requests are submitted - 311 applications that run on location-aware devices can easily submit geographic coordinates that may be more precise than an address spoken by a person.

A good example of the kind of innovation that can be fostered by deploying 311 APIs is the winner of the most recent round of the Apps for Democracy Contest — Social DC 311 — a combination iPhone/Facebook application.

But with all of the potential for new applications and slick new interfaces for 311 services from the advent of 311 APIs and the potential development of an Open311 standard, there is another (less obvious) platform on which innovative, cutting edge applications can be developed.

The ordinary telephone.

Why Phones Matter

Simply stated, phones matter in providing government services because almost all citizens have them (landline telephone penetration rates are somewhere close to 95 percent nationally, and cell phone penetration rates are at about 85 percent). Moreover, almost all citizens that have them understand how to use them, and have some experience navigating IVR or touch tone menu systems. There is no learning curve to ascend before a service request can be submitted.

Telephones are the most ubiquitous communications device on the planet, and they do not suffer from the uneven distribution rates of other consumer communications products. 311 service was built around the telephone, so its a natural interface for new applications.

As stated above, there are plenty of examples of 311 systems that use some automation through IVR and other technologies to route calls to agents. But, at the end of the routing process, a citizen talks to an agent and gives information about a service request to another human.

There are enormous efficiencies that could be gained by being more aggressive with IVR-based automation. Admittedly, not every call (or every caller) is right for an IVR system - that’s OK. One of the things IVR systems do is help entities more appropriately allocate scarce resources. Citizens that can serve themselves will do so using an IVR. Those that can’t (or won’t) will drop out to an agent and submit their request the old fashioned way. The finite number of agents on hand to take calls get focused on “high need” callers that require human assistance.

Back To The Future

As I stated in a previous post, there has simply never been a more varied and powerful array of tools available for developers to build phone applications than exists today. Open standards and open APIs (like those listed below) have removed the barriers between phone application development and traditional web development. What’s even more exciting is the potential introduced by the increasing ubiquity of VoIP, which is blurring the lines between traditionally telephony and other communications channels.

Governments don’t need expensive proprietary software or hardware, or a team of highly trained developers to build and deploy a high-volume IVR phone application. With choice has come ease of use and downward pressure on costs. Some of the newest and most innovative platforms around for building phone applications are listed below:

• Tropo
• Couldvox
• CallFire
• TringMe
• Twilio
• Ribbit

Want to build a portable phone app that conforms to open standards from the W3C? VoiceXML and CCXML are your ticket - these standards are supported on a large (and growing) number of platforms.

Want to build an open source solution that leverages your in house skills in PHP or Ruby? Stand up an Asterisk server and get cracking with PHPAGI or Adhearsion.

Need to connect to the PSTN but don’t want to invest in expensive specialized hardware? Call up a VoIP provider and deploy some SIP trunks.

The sea change in telephone application development over the last several years means more developers have the skills and tools to build sophisticated phone applications. It also means that government need not be locked into any one platform or vendor that has unique expertise in phone systems.

As the Open311 dialog moves forward, and as more and more municipalities begin deploying 311 APIs, it will be interesting to see what develops. Whatever awaits those of us that are interested in what is to come, I hope that there will be some phones involved.

Open Gov: A Means to and End

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, Open Government, Standards

With all of the activity and excitement taking place around the country focused on new Government 2.0 and open government initiatives, its easy for those involved to get lost in the technology. Those of us that love technology and work with it for a living can get lost pretty quickly in the minutia of implementing an new solution.

A perfect example of this in my mind is the recently released iPhone App developed by the City of Boston for submitting municipal complaints. When asked why the city chose to develop an iPhone application, a senior advisor to the Mayor said:

“We chose the iPhone mostly because of its sex appeal - because it’s new and it’s hot.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone and I think its exciting that state and local governments are developing applications for it, to make it easier for citizens to interact with their governments. I salute the City of Boston’s initiative in developing an application that makes it easier to submit municipal service requests. But most of the people that live in Boston don’t own iPhones. Most of the cell phone owners in Boston don’t have an iPhone either - so why choose the iPhone as a platform for a publicly funded application?

The city might have been better off developing an application that worked on more mobile devices. This could have been a web-based application that worked in the micro browsers that come with older cell phones as well as the more powerful browser software that ships with iPhones, G1 phones and other advanced mobile devices. They might have even developed a voice/DTMF interface for people (like my Mom) that use their cell phones the old fashion way. If they had, a lot more people might have been able to use the new service.

The point is that the goal of Gov 2.0 initiatives should not be the deployment of the “hottest” applications on the platforms with the most “sex appeal.” Gov 2.0 initiatives, and all of the exciting new technologies they bring to the table, are good for one thing - helping governments do their jobs more efficiently. That’s it.

As more governments jump on the Gov 2.0 bandwagon, it will be important for public officials to remain focused on the goals of their governments, their agencies and their offices - this will require an intimate understanding of the mission of government and a well developed set of metrics to help determine if Gov 2.0 technologies are helping governments more efficiently achieve their goals.

With this in mind, it was extremely gratifying to see Beth Noveck (of Wiki Government fame, who leads President Barack Obama’s open-government initiative) say the following:

Q: How will you measure the impact of these [open government] innovations?

A: Developing recommendations on transparency and open government has to include a process for developing metrics. We can talk about the number of data feeds we’ve released, or the number of people who’ve participated in rule making [but] we really have to look at transparency and participation to a specific end. So if our goal is improving the quality of American education or increasing accessibility and affordability of health care, we really have to look at those as the metrics and ask ourselves, “How does driving innovation into the way the public sector works help us to ultimately do the job better of making those hard policy decisions?”

Here’s hoping that those involved in Gov 2.0 and open government initiatives around the country take the time needed at the inception of their projects to as the questions: “What exactly are we trying to achieve here?” and “How will we measure our performance so that we know we’re making progress toward our goal?”

Or, when in doubt, ask - what would Beth Noveck do?

Measuring Gov 2.0 Performance

Posted by Mark Headd under Open Government, Standards, Twitter

If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.”

- Lord Kelvin

There is a lot of exciting news lately coming from state and local governments about innovative new uses for social networking and Gov 2.0 tools. Even the smallest burgs and hamlets in our fair nation are on Twitter, and even the lowliest first-term legislator has a Facebook page - sometimes before they have an office assignment.

But before governments go too far down the road of building Gov 2.0 tools into their business processes, it may be worth exploring if conventional performance measures are adequate to measure if (and by how much) Gov 2.0 tools are improving the job being done by governments. As Lord Kelvin said - “To measure is to know.”

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s many governments implemented new e-Government services for their citizens, and reorganized service delivery around Internet-based functionality. Government performance measures were infused with terms like unique hits, click-troughs and the like to more adequately track performance through this new channel.

Does the advent of Gov 2.0 and the increased use of social networking tools warrant a re-examination of the ways that governments evaluate how good a job they are doing? How do you measure customer satisfaction when a government interacts with a citizen via Twitter, or leaves a comment on a blog or Facebook page?

More importantly, how do government measure (and capture) the cost savings that may be brought about by using social networking tools, and approaches like “Wiki-Government“?

Some things to think about as Gov 2.0 gets more mature, and more widely used.

Ides of March

Posted by Mark Headd under Standards

This month promises to be an important one for the advancement of open standards for voice applications.

The World Wide Web Consortium is scheduled to publish the CCXML 1.0 standard as a “Candidate Recommendation” this month, an important step in the advancement of this standard and the first change in its status in some time (the standard has been stalled in “Last Call Working Draft” status since January of 1997).

I and other voice application developers are anxiously awaiting the arrival of this milestone. The time has come to move this important standard forward.

The Penguin Loves Obama

Posted by Mark Headd under Linux, Open Source, Standards

Will he love the penguin back?

That’s the hope of a number of prominent open source advocates who have written an open letter to President Obama encouraging greater use of open source software in the federal government:

Mr. President, we believe the open-source industry is changing the world of software development in many of the ways you have promised to change American politics. The values of open source mirror those you promoted in your campaign: hope, change, and openness. We, the undersigned, sincerely hope that you will make the use of open-source software a key component of every new technology initiative the United States government enters into during your presidency.

Here’s hoping that President Obama sees the connection between his campaign’s call for change and embracing better ideas for our future, and the principles of open source software development.

Audio Control in VoiceXML: Redux

Posted by Mark Headd under Development Tools, Open Source, Standards

One of the questions I hear most from VoiceXML developers relates to audio control features in VoiceXML. VoiceXML does not natively support the ability to “rewind” or “fast forward” through audio files, but some vendors provide this functionality as extensions on their platforms.

Does this mean you can’t implement audio control in a VoiceXML application? No, it doesn’t.

Over 2 years ago, I wrote a post describing how to achieve audio control in VoiceXML in a way that was portable and platform agnostic. I continue to think that this is the right approach for achieving audio control in voice applications.

VoiceXML is a markup language that can be used in conjunction with any number of server side languages: PHP, Perl, Java, C#, Ruby, etc. If it can be used to build a traditional web app, it can be used to build a VoiceXML app as well.

I think it’s great that other platforms are providing innovative ways to provide language-specific methods for achieving audio control in voice applications.

But the true power of VoiceXML is that it is standards based, runs on a large number of platforms, and won’t shoehorn you into a programming language that may not be right for you.

VoiceXML = Flexibility, Portability, Opportunity!

Spread the Love

Posted by Mark Headd under General Discussion, Standards, Twitter

Is YouYube getting preferential treatment from governments?

Frederic Lardinois, of ReadWriteWeb, argues that when it comes to posting videos online governments should spread the love:

Lately, there has been a trend for government agencies and elected officials to put their videos up on YouTube. While we commend them for doing so, we can’t help but wonder if this is, in the end, a positive trend. After all, while YouTube is definitely the most popular video sharing site, it is definitely not the only one.

He’s right. I’ve made this same argument about governments using Twitter. There are other microblogging sites out there, and governments need to make sure that their use of new channels to communicate with citizens (whether through video or microblogging) is not targeted to one specific company.

Some might argue that using multiple video sharing or microblogging sites is just adding work. Don’t underpayed and overburdened public employees have enough to do?

If this is the argument, then I’d respond by saying that the use of these services should be automated — almost all of them (certainly any of them worth using) have an API that makes it easy to develop scripts or applications that can significantly cut down the time and effort required to post content. YouTube has one. So does Twitter.

Social networking platforms are becoming the norm for government communication and outreach. Its time for governments to get smart about their use of these services.

Automate your processes. Use the APIs. Spread the love.

Twitter and the Public Sector

Posted by Mark Headd under Standards, Twitter

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need for standards to guide governments in their use of microblogging platforms like Twitter.

Government Technology magazine has a new article about the different uses being found for Twitter in the public sector, highlighting some popular applications — including the use of Twitter for emergency notifications (something I’ve written about before). They even provide a Twitter “primer” for CIOs.

As the use of microblogging platforms by the public sector increase, I think the need for some basic standards will grow more acute.

It would be nice to see an organization like NASCIO or a similar organization step in and provide some guidance to governments that would help make public-sector Twitter accounts easier to find and more consistent.

UPDATE:

A friend just made me wise to an interesting event taking place in just a few minutes:

FEMA Administrator David Paulison will be available from 3 -3:30 pm Monday, Jan 12, 2009, to give a message and reply to questions using the agency’s Twitter account, femainfocus. The agency’s top official will discuss where FEMA was, where it is now, and where he sees it going.

This looks like a pretty novel way of using Twitter to communicate with the public, and I’m interested to see how it goes.