Back to our regular program

Wow! I'm back from vacation, summer is (almost) over, SpeechTEK 2009 is over, kids are back to school. Hope I'll finally have some spare time for small pet projects.

In particulary, I'll try to continue working on a small Erlang framework for developing communication applications that can be used across several channels: phone, IM, web. I used it for developing demos I gave at SpeechTEK.

The framework offers a simple synchronous API to write dialog-based applications, à la Tropo. In a matter of days (thanks to Erlang, Yaws, and exmpp), I have been able to make the framework

• generate VoiceXML for the Voxeo platform,
  
• interact with IMified and ejabberd,
  
• do some outbound calling by interfacing to the Asterisk gateway interface, and
• use NuGram Hosted Server for dynamic grammar generation and semantic interpretation of text-based interactions.
  

And a few more things. (I'll blog about this framework on our corporate blog in the upcoming weeks.)

I used the framework to develop a complete application for monitoring web sites. When a web site fails to answer, the application tries to reach me. It first tries to reach me on my preferred IM account. If I'm not available, it then tries to call me. If I don't answer, it sends me an SMS message. I also have a web interface that mimics an IM client.

This is, IMO, a very cool project. Unfortunately, most of the code I wrote has been completely obsoleted by some of the recent Voxeo announcements (here and here): their Prophecy platform and Tropo can now be used for text-based channels... Unless you want to run everything on your own server.