As an IVR developer, though, it is somewhat frustrating to see heaps of scorn placed on IVR systems that are designed poorly when it seems as if there are a lot more web sites that are poorly designed.

I’ve groused about this in the past, and I’m obviously showing my bias here, but its pretty frustrating to see IVRs get what seems like the brunt of the criticism. (Sorry for the rant…)

BTW, your on the blog roll now as well. Cheers!

Thanks for the mention.

It’s true that a lot of people are driven to Fonolo out of frustration with IVRs. But I t see our role as much than an antidote to bad IVR design. Like it or not, the IVR interface is here to stay. First because it serves a gateway to live human interaction (usually a call center) and second because it is truly a least-common-denominator interface. Furthermore, the growing array of tools for building IVRs will drive up their prevalence. What Fonolo does is leverage all the work companies (and IVR developers) have put into this particular interface and make it *better* by automatically adding a visual interface and some “smarts” like Deep Dialing and bookmarking.

Shai

Fonolo CEO and co-founder.

http://www.fonolo.com — Try it out today for free!

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I do think that services like Twillo are a good thing for voice application developers, and skilled developers of any stripe can use Twillo to make sophisticated, well-built, robust voice applications.

I guess the concern I was trying to express was that satisfaction levels with IVR systems has traditionally been very low. It isn’t hard to find examples of poorly designed IVRs. Part of the answer for addressing this is making the principles of good voice application design more accessible to developers.

My own personal feeling is that the test of a good voice application development tool is not whether it can make developing voice applications easier, but whether it can make developing good voice applications easier.

Ultimately, though, I think that new services like Twillo will go a long way toward motivating other platform vendors (VoiceXML platforms in particular) to ensure that their platforms are easy to use and can support robust, well-built voice applications.

Thanks for the input!

BTW, I’ve added the Twillo blog to my blogroll.

Very interesting analysis. You’ve done some excellent research into voice platforms.

Putting on my Twilio hat for a moment.
You’ve hit on what we think Twilio is all about: web developers. There is this huge body of talent out there that already knows how to build and scale web applications, why make them learn a new API to build voice apps?

We strove to make Twilio as web-developer-friendly as possible while allowing developers to use their language of choose PHP/Python/Java/C#/VB etc. While XML is part to our API, there are is also a large RESTful part as well:
http://www.twilio.com/docs/api_reference/REST/

While comparisons to VoiceXML and CallXML in inevitable (we created a little comparison here http://www.twilio.com/voicexml-comparison) our goal is to open voice applications up to a whole new audience.

You are absolutely right there are lots of web developers that did not think about important issues like accessibility, scalability, security but there are lots that do. Here is a short presentation we put together describing the market.
http://www.slideshare.net/twilio/twilio-web-service-api-for-building-voice-applications-presentation

As you play around with Twilio, look at common tasks like accessing a recorded messages over the web or playing MP3s. We’ve really tried to lower the bar and make hard stuff easy! If there are things we’ve missed that you would expect to be there let us know.

-Evan