Cloud Telephony Experiments

It seems like every other day now we get a blog post about how one technology/channel is dead and how this new thing is now the best thing since sliced bread. First they said the phone call is dead. Not . Then they said email is dead. Or support over email is dead. etc etc. Not Though these may be ok to get page views, the reality of the matter is quite different. Phone calls and Email usage has not gone down ( for businesses, its a different story for B2C). In fact it has increased. And all the blog posts take some example of a bad implementation and highlight what is wrong with the old technology or channel. Problem is even in the new channels, in app support etc there are some very bad examples. But that does not mean that the problem is with the channels. The problem is with the implementations. Flickr For example, very few IVR systems use the context of the caller and provide help. Very few use speech recognition technologies which have improved by leaps and...

The chat bots have arrived. Well at least thats what popular media wants you to believe. The mental image we get when we hear about Chatbots is that of some sentient program which will converse seamlessly with humans and solve our problems. Well, version 1 of the chatbots are anything but. Because the chatbots have been so overhyped, people seem to expect a lot from them. The fact of the matter is that chat is just another medium and we still have a long way to go before computer programs understand you and answer your queries. But thats ok. What we have now is a step forward. Most chatbots I have encountered are nothing more than glorified "if-then-else" programs. But as long as they answer my queries, I am happy. So, instead of calling them chatbots, maybe if we call them Interactive Chat Response Systems(ICRs),maybe people will have lesser expectations and follow the on screen prompts and get their queries resolved. ICRs have some advantages over IVRs. Since you ...

You can play with the StoryBot here Ever since bots have arrived on KooKoo , I have been thinking of what cool bots should I build for a demo. There are already a lot of cool bots being built for some of the startups we work with, but they are all in stealth mode :) So I went ahead and built a story bot on Facebook messenger using KooKoo . The stories from the wonderful people at Storyweaver . Since the stories have a creative commons license, I went ahead and used the stories. The design is pretty simple. Each story is in a directory and when a user sends a FB message, a random story is displayed to the user. The user can then interact and go to next pages or stop the conversation and start a new story. The idea is to make this an interactive story bot which encourages kids and parents to read together with questions and answers about the story etc. Please leave your suggestions in the comments below. You can download the code here at Github  and build your own Sto...

When we started with KooKoo , it was just a cloud telephony platform. It solved a specific need of allowing developers access to the telephony stack to build telephony apps using web programming languages. But as it matured, we knew that just voice would not be sufficient. We already integrated with email and social media for specific customers based on their requirements. But it was not at a platform level. So when Facebook launched their API we knew it was a perfect fit for KooKoo. We went ahead and integrated FB messenger API in KooKoo. Since Telegram, Slack and others also have well defined bot APIs, it was easy to integrate those also. Though we completed the integration in a couple of days, the FB review process took forever and finally they accepted our bot :) So today we announce an early release version of our KooKoo chat bot API. Using simple XML tags you can now build your chat bots on KooKoo. All the 10,000+ developers on our KooKoo platform now have access t...

Tl;Dr: Its Lonely When we started KooKoo in late 2009, APIs as business was sort of new. Twilio was just picking up and new API businesses were coming up. Fast forward to 2016 and we have learnt a lot about running an API business in India. 1. Its lonely. An API is an endpoint. An endpoint by itself is not so useful. Its usefulness grows exponentially when it can integrate with other endpoints to create mashups. Unfortunately, I cant think of one API business in India other than us. So the only mashups we create are with APIs from startups in the US. But what is surprising is that we are still,after 6 years, the only public API platform in India. 2. Developer ecosystem is not too big. We had reached almost all active developers in India in 3 years. But since new developers are created every year you need to continue with your evangelism. 3. Conducting hackathons and other developer evangelism is a must. But after conducting 4-5 hackathons, we started getting repeat hackers. ...

We have almost never bid for our company name, Ozonetel, in Google. Our reasoning was that since anyway we show up as the first link it would not matter much. We have also never bid for a competitor's name. Comparison Some of our competitors have been bidding on our name for the last few years. We are ok with it. Not too concerned because we know we have a better product. And we would want the customers to know our competition. We have enough confidence in our product and do not want to win a customer just because he does not know about our competitors. But this time, one competitor went a step ahead. He started using our name in the ad copy ( as shown below) which is against Google rules and also put some falsifications in the landing page. Some falsifications can be put down to ignorance, but some were clearly purposeful, like we not having a Salesforce integration . We informed Google and also the competitor concerned and they have now apparently removed our...

Chatbots are great. But they are not perfect. Chatbots have been glorified as the next coming of customer service. And why not. The thought of humans interacting with AI to get things done is sexy. Only problem is that level of tech, especially in AI, is not up there yet. I have no doubt we will get there soon. But we are not there yet. So when Facebook announced their send/receive API at their F8 conference we at Ozonetel knew we had to integrate it with our cloud contact center solution, Cloudagent . Luckily, our system is very loosely coupled with clear interfaces and we were able to get the integration done in a couple of days(our engineers are not too happy as they had to pull an all nighter :)) So, when your chatbots get stuck and are not able to answer your customer queries, connect your FB messenger with Cloudagent and provide help from real agents . It works almost like a live web chat system, but over FB messenger and all the regular features like routing to agents, ...