Today at SpeechTEK Europe, Voxeo expanded its free developer program to include international SMS numbers, support for European languages, and local Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers.
Targeted at developers in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, these enhancements allow for the creation of voice, IVR, text, and multichannel communications applications in a free development environment. In addition to the U.S. phone numbers currently available for developers to use in testing their applications, developers can now use country-specific numbers throughout EMEA. More than 100,000 developers use Voxeo's platform and Voxeo's production applications are deployed globally.
Voxeo's developer portal provides free hosted access to the Prophecy platform as well as resources, and technical support for the easy creation of interactive voice response (IVR), voice recognition, VoIP, SMS, or communications applications. With this new announcement Voxeo expands its developer program with:
- SMS-enabled international numbers - Moving beyond simply using voice, developers can add SMS-enabled numbers and enable their application to communicate with customers via both voice and text/SMS.
- Support for new languages - Applications using automatic speech recognition (ASR) or text-to-speech (TTS) can now choose from more than 20 languages and voices, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Swedish, U.K. English, and many more.
- Self-provisioning of international DID numbers - Developers can easily add international inbound DID numbers from more than 40 countries to their applications through a simple Web interface.
- International outbound dialing - In the development environment, applications can make outbound calls for free to 18 countries.
- Country-specific developer dial-in numbers - Developers can now dial local numbers in countries across EMEA to test their applications. Previously developers could test using U.S. numbers, as well as using Skype or SIP.
Developers can use the free developer portal to create and test any kind of communications application and then simply move it into a production environment when the application is ready to go live.
"Our goal is to reduce the friction in the industry that has prevented developers from building international next-generation communications applications," says Jonathan Taylor, CEO at Voxeo. "With these new enhancements to our hosted developer program, we're making it simple for anyone to get started building a truly global application using voice or SMS."
Developers interested in participating in the expanded program can sign up for a free account at http://evolution.voxeo.com/. Existing developers can sign into Voxeo's Evolution developer portal to add international numbers to their existing applications.
A detailed overview of Voxeo's new developer services, including supported countries and languages, is available for download at: http://evolution.voxeo.com/worldwide/faq.jsp.