Cloud Telephony Experiments

Sorry for the delay in writing a blog post. I have been caught up in too many things since last month(we are growing, so its all good :)) Anyway, this week I thought I will look at how we can use the latest rockstar startup from India, Freshdesk . Freshdesk, as most of you know is one of the best "Social Helpdesk" systems out there. I am sure most of you are already using Freshdesk to support your customers. In this blogpost I will explain how you can add telephony to the mixture. In particular I will show some code which you can use to : Welcome the caller by name Ask him to enter his ticket id Play out the ticket status Connect the caller to the correct agent handling the ticket. Luckily for us, Freshdesk has a very well defined API and it was a pleasure to work with it. The engineers were also very supportive and answered all my queries quickly. So lets get into the code directly. 1. First we need to get the caller information. For this we need to a...

We hacked up a small speech recognition demo app using KooKoo and Google docs spreadsheets. Just call 040-30952097  011-30908697 and say the name of your favorite IPL team. It should recognize your speech and update your vote in a Google doc spreadsheet immediately. You can view the Google doc at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0At93eg1xO6iadF9vUHY0OEQ0TzV0UkdZTGZub2tDV3c&gid=4 This also shows how we can upload IVR data to google spreadsheets for analytics. Note: We are using an unreleased recognize API for this app. This is a very basic fun app and if KooKoo does not recognize your team, then maybe you said it wrong ;)

This time, its a personal blog post. One of our star developers, Rajesh Ganji is getting married on April 14th. Working in a hacker culture makes people do interesting things. This time Rajesh took his job too seriously and ended building an IVR using KooKoo for his wedding invitation :) He then wrote a program that pulled contacts from his gmail contacts and called them programmatically and played out the IVR wedding invitation. Finally, he hosted the code on github so that future grooms and brides can use it for their own weddings if needed. You can find the code at the end of the post. So go ahead, please call 040-30247070 and listen to the IVR wedding invitation of Rajesh Ganji and wish him the best(you need to press 3 to leave a voice greeting) And though we know that from next week onwards, Rajesh will find it a little bit more harder to concentrate on KooKoo, we wish him all the best in his new adventure. As a side note, another one of our star developers, Sudhakar Gup...

Problem: Customers call your sales people directly. There is no track of these calls. Customer conversation history is not maintained. Customers cannot call a single number for your organization and get connected to their agent directly. Solution: Customer information is present in your Salesforce account. You can manage your calls using KooKoo . We can mashup these two to create a simple customer call management solution in 10 mins. Allows customer calls on a single phone number. If the caller  is already associated with a RM, KooKoo plays the customer name and connects him directly to RM. Customer case history is updated for the call automatically. If there is no customer records, KooKoo identifies the available RM and connects the call and creates the case history for the caller automatically. How to do it? Requirements: Salesforce account with Force.com sites enabled. You can get one here KooKoo account. You can get one here Steps: Create a Visual Fo...

Adapted from Random Musings by Sandeep: It's finally here. As you all know, OpenVBX is open source web phone system created by Twilio . It allows you to create your business phone system using a simple drag and drop approach. Accompanied by its plugin repository, it has become a very successful and hacker friendly for people to come out with very innovative integrations. You can find some videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDqyvJzRYA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIHfBg80hhc You want A/B testing of your call flows, we got you covered. You want call routing, that's there too. What about CRM integration? Absolutely yes. You can find these and a lot more plugins at the Plugin Repository Because it is such a useful system and it is open source, other telephony guys have also provided their own flavours, the most famous of which is TropoVBX We have also been thinking of releasing a KooKoo patch for OpenVBX, but for lack of time we were not able to get a...

As you know, we have a lot of developers building voice services on our KooKoo platform. Most of them have a problem of discoverability. Also, we were talking to several telcos and though most of them provide short code VAS services, remembering the short codes is a pain. One other problem was that building location based voice services currently is tough. So we were trying to think of some innovative way in which to solve these problems and we came up with the idea of building a simple android app which provides a clickable icon for all these services. Though the idea is simple, we hope that this solves some major problems. So we went ahead and hacked up "KooKoo Voice App Directory" , an android app.( https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ozonetel.kookooappexchange ). At its heart, KooKoo Voice App Directory , is a contact directory application which tries to solve 3 problems. 1. Discovery : KooKoo has been a very popular platform for developers to build teleph...

We are starting of the new year with a new partnership. Thanks to Aksharspeech( http://www. aksharspeech.com/ ) the <playtext> tag now supports Hindi and Telugu with Kannada coming soon. Just mention the language in the attribute "lang" With this, developers can now build telephony applications with text to speech in local languages. We also thank Aksharspeech for working with us in integrating the services . This attribute is free to try in the KooKoo developer account. For paid accounts to use this, there will be an extra charge of Rs.500 per KooKoo account per month. Example XML: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><response filler="yes">        <playtext speed="2" quality="normal" lang="TE">తలుగు పన        చసతుంద</playtext>        <playtext speed="2" quality="normal">In English</playtext>        <playtext speed="2...