Patrick Barnard wrote a very nice post about Voxify on his Making Contact TMCnet blog after speaking with the heads of our sales and marketing groups. Patrick’s post aptly summarizes the nature of the hosted speech applications that Voxify provides.
For the sake of credibility regarding real world speech application implementations, it’s important to note that we don’t claim we can implement every imaginable integrated application in less than eight weeks. Patrick doesn’t say that either, but I can see how some people might jump to that conclusion. Some applications require the development of very complex call flows and extremely technically challenging integrations to back end systems. I think we still deploy these complex kinds of applications surprisingly quickly, though.
The telephony integration for a hosted speech application can add time, too, if a lot of changes need to be made to existing circuits or if new circuits need to be provisioned. The telecom companies have gotten a lot better about this, but it can still take them 1-2 weeks to provision a new line. Fortunately, we’re able to catch most of these situations up front and get all of the telecom work queued up early.
But, Voxify absolutely can design, develop and deploy integrated speech applications in less than eight weeks. We’ve done that for several clients, and we’ve made some changes to our platform that will enable us to deliver that fast much more often in the future.
Part of the reason we can develop speech applications so quickly is that we have the experience from developing a lot of applications. In addition, we took the time, either during those deployments or soon after, to capture that experience in our core platform or in reusable libraries. We now have a very powerful platform and a strong set of reusable horizontal (e.g., geographical location, billing and shipping address, credit card information, etc.) and vertical (e.g., flight info, hotel reservation, prescription refill, order status, etc.) libraries. We also have a very efficient set of deployment processes that we have honed during all of our previous deployments. And, oh yeah, there are a bunch of smart people in our office who continually amaze me.