Upcoming conferences

Looking to hear more about MyVox?  If you are attending one of these conferences, or will just be in the area when I am, look me up and we’ll chat:

• Feb. 28-29, Miami:  Future of Web Apps and BarCampMiami
• Mar. 3-4, San Diego:  Graphing Social Patterns, in conjunction with O’Reilly’s ETech conference
• Mar. 15, Cambridge:  MobileCampBoston (tentatively)
• Mar 17-20, Mountain View:  MashupCamp

The growing world of voice APIs

I remember when the phrase “voice mashup” was one we only heard in our offices, talking to each other. Now, it feels like I can’t go a day without reading “voice mashup” or “VoIP mashup” or “phone mashup” somewhere.

And in conjunction with that talk, there’s also a lot of activity - many companies recognizing that voice and phones can become serious tools for serious application development, if they can be offered up in a form that lets developers from other realms make use of them. So we are seeing this… well, not explosion, but at least a burp of activity around voice- and phone-related APIs. Here are a few of the players:

* Cepstral:  Long-time providers of text-to-speech, Cepstral recently launched VoiceForge, which offers text-to-speech through a SOAP-based API. You can pick from about thirty voices, and even train VoiceForge to produce your own voice from your text! Cepstral prices their

* Voxbone:  Providers of inbound VoIP lines and phone numbers, Voxbone has an API to allow anybody to sell and provision Voxbone lines.  Use of the API itself is free; Voxbone makes its money on the sales of lines.

* Evoca:  Evoca has an API with similar capabilities to that of MyVox.  However, use of their API is not free; it is designed for use by business looking to streamline the development of certain kinds of voice mashups.

* Ifbyphone:  Ifbyphone offers an API for building “voice forms”.  This is basically a way of configuring an IVR to collect information from a user and deliver it to another application.  Ifbyphone’s API is not free - like Evoca, the target is businesses who are willing to lay out cash to get easy access to such capabilities.

Whether or not I agree with each company’s business model (and, to be clear, I like some of the above a lot), these companies, together with MyVox, demonstrate growing recognition of an unmet need.  That need is one that comes from developers of all sorts who want to harness the power of the phone, and tie it into their applications, but do not want to deploy, maintain, or learn the esoterica of phone technologies.

Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and friends

Jeff Pulver is hosting a series of open breakfasts with folks who want to sit and chat with him and other attendees. It’s a great concept: no speakers, no agenda, just the chance for conversation to take place naturally - something that breakfast is good for (except everybody is still waking up). I went to the Miami breakfast this morning.

We had about twelve people at our breakfast. Many people knew each other already, but everybody was happy to talk to those of us who were newbies as well. Some pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adc/tags/smbmiami/show/ Good, creative, entrepreneurial folks - a real find in the Miami area (which is a bit dry of technophiles compared to, say, Boston, New York, or the Bay Area).

It’s an interesting challenge trying to get the word out about the MyVox API. How do you best reach developers, and show them you have something truly useful? Developers are typically very busy, skeptical folks who typically get a lot of their information through outlets that set a very high bar… precisely because they cater to skeptical, busy people. It can be difficult to demonstrate relevance when you are relatively unknown (as opposed to an API from, say, Flickr, or Facebook, or Google). There are many answers to how we are trying to tackle this problem, but breakfasts like this represent one angle; a better version of the same is BarCamps, where you have a concentrated group of developers who are there precisely to learn and exchange ideas.

Speaking of, I will be attending BarCampMiami on Feb. 28th, where MyVox is a sponsor. Will you be there? If so, seek me out!