Cloud Telephony Experiments

We found an innovative use case of telephony by Savdhan.in  We spoke to the founders about their idea and got the following responses: 1. What was the main reason for building this? Deepankar:    To enable 100% women to utilize those important minutes without letting the surroundings know. 2. How are you planning on monetizing this? Deepankar:  Currently it is free and we will take a call if the SMS cost is unmanageable. 3. Any new features that are forthcoming? Deepankar:    Lots of features in terms of audio playback, sirens, location etc, but only if we get some good traction. Overall, its a pretty neat service and has some good use cases. Coming on the heels of the Delhi rape case, the use case may resonate with users. We think, the app has a lot more potential than the main use case. It could be a good group communication app. Just like we can create a group for alerting in case of emergencies, maybe we can create groups for differ...

While building an IVR , you can convey information to your customers either by playing an audio( <playaudio> ) or converting text to speech( <playtext> ). Playtext can be used for dynamic content and playaudio is used for static content. KooKoo supports text to speech in only Indian English as TTS in other languages are not yet of high quality. So to support Indian languages at least in a limited domain, we are releasing a new tag <say-as> which provides the language packs for 10 Indian languages. Using this you can now play dates, numbers, currencies in 10 Indian languages. The tag is intelligent enough to play the text in a grammatically correct fashion depending on the language. Combining say-as tag with playaudio tag you can create IVR system  which sound very professional instead of the robotic TTS voice. You will still need to use the playtext tag to play TTS for dynamic text like names, addresses etc.

So we have just completed 2 years since we launched at Unpluggd 2. Startup Weekend's "The Entrepreneur's Journey" gives a snapshot of a startup's journey. In general, every startup will have the following phases: Get an idea Decide to startup Startup Build a team and product Validation of the product Scale Conquer the world :) As per the above resource, we did the 'I got an idea', 'I want to startup', 'Startup', 'Build a solid team and product' phase in our first year . The second year was all about 'Validation' and 'Scale' So without further ado, some of our numbers this year. Calls handled : 600 million+ Clients : 350+ Registered developers : 4000+ Phone numbers managed : 30000+ Servers managed : 124 Locations : 8 Audio Data managed : 6 TB with 25 GB getting generated everyday Average Database queries per day : 20 million ( max of 70 million in a day, yeah our Mysql clusters are gett...

I have always believed that you won't get the right answers if you don't ask the right questions. For example, if your question is "How do I make money?", then your answers(and hence your actions) will be different than if your question is "How do I make my customers happy?". Also, different roles in a startup/company will have different "driving questions". A sales guy may be asking himself: "Which new vertical should I look at?" "What new use cases should I come out with?" "Who needs my solutions?" A CEO maybe asking himself: "What new partnerships should I make?" "How do I motivate my employees?" "How do I break even?" Disclaimer: I am not a CEO or a sales guy so my example questions maybe wrong :) So currently, the following are some of the questions that drive me being involved in the technical aspects of the cloud telephony domain. "How do I reduce the n...

KooKoo  as most of you know, is a cloud telephony platform using which people have built innovative telephony applications like call and update your Facebook status , call to update your twitter stream etc. As you might be knowing, BITS Pilani conducted a hackathon called as Desert Hack( http://www.deserthack.org/ ) sometime last week and KooKoo, Ozonetel was a part of that. We announced a bounty of Samsung Galaxy Tab2 for the best KooKoo hack. We got the list of hacks last weekend and we were really surprised at the quality of hacks. So we analysed the list of hacks based on the following criteria: 1. Innovativeness 2. Amount of code written 3. Presentation 4. Correctness 5. Aligning with principles of KooKoo and 6. Ability to become big And though it was really hard, we had to select one winner and that is "KIRI". Congrats team "Kiri". You will get your Samsung tab at the earliest. Kiri is an Apple Siri cl...

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 ;)