Teleku

Calling All Telcos…

Remember when VoiceXML was the next big thing? The good news is that it did create a standard programming interface for telephony engineers to develop voice applications once and deploy them on the telco infrastructure of their choice. It’s still heavily utilized today. In fact, most of the enterprise IVR applications are delivered as VXML applications.

One of the problems with VoiceXML is that all of the telco’s implement the VXML spec slightly differently and you need to “fiddle” with your voice application until it works with a new carrier. While this doesn’t promote vendor lock-in, it helps. VoiceXML is a very powerful interface which will meet almost any voice engineer’s requirements; however, it’s complex and typically requires classes and even certification to accomplish. This is certainly not the case for PhoneML, our phone web service language.

Teleku recognizes the power of VoiceXML and designed our platform to leverage it. In fact, VoiceXML is at the heart of our delivery vehicle for interfacing with telcos. Any telco vendor that supports VoiceXML (99% of them) can now accept Teleku originating phone calls running PhoneML and TwiML (and even VoiceXML) applications. We believe that this design will allow us to scale across all telco platforms leveraging unused bandwidth and reduced voice/SMS rates.

We have partnered with Voxeo first because we believe that they are the most technically advanced telco provider in the market. Other telco carriers looking to get into the cloud communications space should contact us and find out how easy it is to get started. Email info [at] getvocal.com.

Teleku Launches!

Teleku is a new cloud-based telecom company that allows Web developers to build and host phone applications that answer inbound calls and initiate outbound calls, interact with Web applications, and send/receive SMS text messages! Using simple XML responses in your HTTP Web pages, you can deliver sophisticated interactive voice response (IVR) telephony applications in as little as 5 minutes!

The Teleku platform runs phone applications written in PhoneML® and traditional VoiceXML. You can even mix XML libraries on a Web service call-by-call basis and chain voice applets together using one or all of the three libraries.

Teleku natively uses Phone Markup Language (PhoneML) to build powerful phone applications quickly and easily. PhoneML can be viewed as a modern and more simple approach to building XML-based telephony applications. PhoneML is a set of RESTful XML commands that allow developers to build simple yet sophisticated phone applications using any Web programming language. We mask the complexities of building a traditional voice application by providing you with a easy Web Service API that handles the complex telco services and even Speech Recognition (ASR) grammar development.

Teleku’s API does not require you to purchase an SDK or download software but rather provides free RESTful Web Services that allow your Web applications to receive telephone, Skype, and SIP calls to interact with callers over the telephone like traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems by playing MP3, WAV, or VOX media files, speaking text-to-speech (TTS) prompts, collecting digits and spoken commands through speech recognition (ASR), recording audio, dialing numbers, transferring calls, etc.

Teleku is hosted in the cloud (specifically Amazon’s EC2 platform) allowing us to scale your phone application from one to thousands of simultaneous calls in the blink of an eye!

Here is an example of a powerful auto attendant script in 5 lines of PhoneML code. You could answer a call, play your company’s jingle, announce your company’s name, prompt the caller to press 1 or say Sales and ultimately transfer the call to the operator by returning the following XML to Teleku.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<phoneml>
<play>http://acme.com/jingle.mp3</play>
<speak>Thanks for calling Acme Labs. Press 1 or say sales 
to be transferred to Sales or press 2 or say support to be 
transferred to Technical Support otherwise stay on the call 
to speak with our Operator</speak>  
<input options="1,2,sales,support">http://acme.com/transfer</input>  
<speak>Transferring to Operator</speak>  
<transfer>602-555-1234</transfer>
</phoneml>

Never has building an Interactive Voice Response (IVR/VRU) system been so simple, affordable, and powerful! “We are excited to see what developers will build with this kind of new technology,” says its founder, Chris Matthieu. This is definitely next generation telecom! Cloud-based computing allows us to scale on demand and it allows you to pay for only what you need, when you need it.

We are issuing Private Beta invitation codes a few at a time to ensure that our services are meeting your expectations. Please follow us on Twitter and @ reply us if you are interested in giving your app a ring!