AVIOS is having their second speech app building contest for student teams. “Cash and/or equipment prizes valued at over $1000 will be awarded to teams of student programmers who design and create applications judged by industry experts to be the most robust, useful, creative, innovative, and user friendly.” The finished application must be submitted by January 31, 2008.
Although the application must at least support speech input or output, students are encouraged to develop multi-modal apps. Many development environments are approved for use in building and running your application. If you are looking to get some long term useful experience out of this exercise, I strongly recommend that you build a VoiceXML app and host it one of the platforms like BeVocal, TellMe, etc. While working with a downloadable environment like Voxeo’s Prophecy would be highly educational, you’ll end up spending a lot of time dealing with stuff that the hosted platforms take care of for you. Even better would be to use a tool that dynamically generates VoiceXML, but there aren’t a lot of free tools available that do that.
Voxeo also offers a hosted developer site that uses the same platform as the downloadable Prophecy version. That way you can have the best of both worlds. Might be worth checking out…
I definitely recommend Voxeo’s hosted developer site. I’ve used it before and was very happy with the features it offered. The only reason I didn’t mention it in my post is that it wasn’t in the list of approved platforms on the actual application form. But, that’s a great idea to get started with the hosted Voxeo site and then once you’ve sorted out the basic VXML development, get your app running on Prophecy.
I’ve been planning to get PhoneBlogger running on Voxeo’s hosted site for a long time (which probably won’t require much more than a DTD change, if anything, so yes, I’m lazy) , but actually I’m a lot more interested in setting aside time to work with a local install of the Voxeo Prophecy platform.