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.
February 25, 2008 at 10:57 pm
[...] Mashups are everywhere. I came across this very interesting post today. I have the same experience as the author. I can’t go a day [...]
February 26, 2008 at 12:08 am
Khyle Keys from IfByPhone here.
I agree that voice mashups are getting more and more traction. On a personal level, I think the term mashup is a tad over-used, but that’s beside the point. I think it’s exciting to see so many different companies approach the same space with different takes on how to add value to businesses.
Our CEO is presenting a EComm and will be focusing on this very subject. I would also like to point out that we also do TTS, Automated Speech Recognition, and automated phone calls as well through our API.
Thanks for the mention.
March 11, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Are there international numbers coming to call soon? For example a Dutch telephone number to call instead of the US Only number? Hope te hear from you soon!
March 11, 2008 at 1:02 pm
@corne:
Soon! We’re working on the ability for you to associate any phone number with the MyVox phone systems right now. That will include international numbers. You would be paying toll charges on these dedicated lines; we will likely roll out free lines in other countries down the road, but this is not yet on our schedule.