Ifbyphone, a voice infrastructure and application development company providing enterprise class services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) has announced today a partnership with Voxeo (News - Alert) Corporation.
This provider of standards-based Interactive Voice Response (IVR
) and Voice-over-IP (VoIP) platforms is relying on Ifbyphone to provide sophisticated, last-mile solutions. These solutions are based on a simple question: If an SMB has more telephone conversations with their customers will their business increase?
“Voxeo is the ideal partner for Ifbyphone custom IVR solutions because they provide a high-performance, open standards platform with world class product support,” says Irv Shapiro, CEO, Ifbyphone, in a Wednesday statement.
"The Ifbyphone dynamic VoiceXML (News - Alert) technologies enable web developers to focus on solutions instead of syntax. If you can build a web site you can easily build a sophisticated IVR using our ‘Voice of the Web’ solution," continues Shapiro.
IVR solutions have historically been limited to large enterprises due to cost and complexity. The partnership powers the Ifbyphone “Voice of the Web” hosted IVR capabilities. These capabilities are available from a user friendly website and accessed from any telephone or via the powerful Ifbyphone application programming interface (API
).
“With Ifbyphone’s deployment of Voxeo’s Prophecy platform, SMBs can now reap productivity gains and improve customer service in ways that previously only larger companies could afford," says John Amein, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Voxeo, in Wednesday’s statement.
Ifbyphone can deliver the power of voice to any business by combining the affordability of an open source Asterisk (News - Alert) and Linux infrastructure, the sophistication and flexibility of industry standard VoiceXML and the Ifbyphone VoiceXML application framework technologies.
Traditional IVR solutions proved to be rigid, complex to build and support, and expensive. Companies like Ifbyphone are changing this standard with Hosted IVR and companies such as Voxeo have rallied around the VoiceXML and CCXML standards to drive the cost down, while increases the flexibility of IVR solutions.
”While these new standards have opened up the IVR space to large corporations and spawned a wealth of solutions, these VoiceXML solutions still require the end customer to learn VoiceXML, CCXML, speech grammar syntax and programming talent,” said Shapiro. “The requirements to learn these new tools and technologies, and the cost of the VoiceXML platforms have excluded all but the largest companies.”
Ifbyphone has done well to develop a proprietary set of technologies which dynamically generate VoiceXML and CCXML applications based on end user input. These application specifications are presented to the user via a Web 2.0 style site which leads the user through the configuration of click to call solutions, virtual receptionists, interactive voice response dialogs, voice broadcast configuration, location based call routing
, and schedule based call routing.
When a call is received via click to call, application, API call, inbound telephone or scheduled outbound telephone call, the Ifbyphone VoiceXML generator dynamically builds an application to handle the call. This approach provides the cost effectiveness and flexibility of the VoiceXML world to companies that lack the technologic expertise to build the applications in VoiceXML.
By centralizing the infrastructure necessary to execute the generated VoiceXML/CCXML applications and negotiating volume contracts with VOIP and PSTN
partners Ifbyphone is able to deliver highly cost effective solutions to the SMB marketplace.
This partnership pairs Voxeo Prophecy, the only platform that is certified 100 percent compliant with all mandatory and optional VoiceXML tests, and with Ifbyphone’s “Voice of the Web” suite of services. This suite includes:
Click to Call with Custom Dialog Forms
Integrated Call Routing and Reporting
Find Me
Virtual Voice Mail
Virtual Receptionist
Outbound Voice Broadcast
Web Configured Voice Dialogs (Hosted IVR)
Call Recording
Backend Database Integration
Complete Call Management API
Complete Call Scheduling
All Ifbyphone solutions work with any telephone system and are fully portable if a company moves from one telephone transport vendor to another. Ifbyphone provides free telephone support for all services.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.
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Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) | X |
A PSTN number is a dialed call which is switched or connected via a CO switching system called a Class 5 End office or in SS7....more |
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |
Application Programming Interface (API) | X |
A Remote Procedure Call (APC) also known as an Applications Programming Interface is a software programming function that allow one software program to activate (call function) another software progra...more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Routing | X |
There are many often too many explanation of routing. Here�s one:
Hop-by-Hop Routing - IP Routing
- Distributes routing to routers
- Networks look/act like trees
- Data can traverse many routers ...more |