Phone Mashups, Integrating Telephony and the Web

Millions of web sites have nothing that fits into a shopping cart.  The businesses behind these web sites face a challenge; how do they convert clickers into callers?  Major enterprises have access to sophisticated call processing systems that address this dilemma with custom Click-to-Call, interactive voice response (IVR) and voice broadcast solutions.  While the VoiceXML and CCXML standards have driven down the cost of custom IVR, these solutions are still too complex and expensive for many independent developers and small businesses.  While many Click-to-Call solutions are now available in the marketplace they tend to be limited in flexibility.  Developers and small businesses need access to cost effective full featured telephony building blocks designed for integration into web applications.  These building blocks need to be usable by any web developer with basic web form coding skills.  In essence; the telephony API should replace web forms with voice forms.

The Ifbyphone "Voice of the Web" family of services provides a complete set of hosted building blocks that provide Smart Click-to-Call, VoiceMail, Find Me, Virtual Receptionist, IVR Voice Forms and Smart Voice Broadcast at a price point affordable to any business. These voice applications are configured over the web from any standard browser.  Each application is accessible via an API call, an inbound telephone call or a scheduled outbound call.  The Ifbyphone API is compatible with any web implementation language. 

This technology talk describes the Ifbyphone fault tolerant architecture which integrates half a million lines of custom code with both open source and proprietary solutions.  The hosted "Voice of the Web" infrastructure is available to developers building applications that mashup the best of the web with the intimacy of the telephone.  These mashups have complete access to automated speech recognition, multiple text to speech voices and DTMF processing.  As part of this talk I will present examples of phone mashup applications built using the Ifbyphone API.