Provider of IVR, enterprise focused, cloud-based, customer engagement solutions Angel.com has announced the success of its customer experience lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's, or "MIT (News - Alert)," School of Engineering.

Through a course, entitled "Engineering Innovation and Design," MIT students were tasked with identifying a real-world problem to solve using voice applications. In addition, they were asked to build a business case, and design a voice solution to solve that problem.

In this semester's class, some of the solutions developed include automated voice applications to find the best parties and nightlife in town, manage to-do lists via the phone -- complete with speech to text -- and steer remote-control cars, all via a phone call.

Company officials said that the "MITchell Partymann" Facebook (News - Alert) Party App enables students to invite a virtual MIT party character to their party within Facebook, and then others can call the Partymann phone number to have relevant data on local parties read back to them over the phone.

With Foursquare Voice, users can interact with the location-based social networking Web site, Foursquare, to connect with their friends in real time. Company officials said that users can check-in, earn badges, hear tips, keep a to-do list, find friends and even record messages for Twitter, Facebook and iPhone (News - Alert) -- all via the phone.

Company officials said that the "Echo" To Do List Manager enables users to call a phone number and setup to-do lists, shopping lists, and more, and then check off items when completed. Moreover, integration was added for speech to text conversion to make lists even easier to create.

The "Car Talk" Remote Control Car Application allows use of Web services and an Ardunio chip to talk to a controller that sends signals to an RC car, and callers can speak commands through a phone -- such as "turn left" and "go forward" -- that direct the car.

"This class was such a huge success that students have joined the Gordon program because of it," said Blade Kotelly, guest instructor for the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program.

If Apple (News - Alert) made an interface for designing speech applications, it would be the Angel.com Site Builder toolkit, Kotelly said, adding that there's no better tool for designing voice applications.

"Angel.com's technology has been deployed within a university as prestigious as MIT to help foster creativity among future engineers and prepare these students for prospective careers in voice application design," said Dave Rennyson, president and COO at Angel.com.

Earlier this month, Angel.com deployed Empirix's (News - Alert) voice watch monitoring solution through a Software-as-a-Service platform.