Dial By Name Directory

As part of the overhaul of our Hosted PBX offering, we've been looking at some of our core apps - specifically our Dial by Name Directory. The way it currently works is that someone calls in, types the first characters of the name of the person he or she wants to speak with. Once the user is found, the system spells back the name of the person as confirmation and then connects the call. If you're asking for Bob Smith, waiting for the system to spell out B-O-B-pause-S-M-I-T-H isn't so bad. However, if you're calling for Jean-Louis Davidson, it can start to get a little annoying.

Our challenge is that the Media Servers/Application Servers that we've built the current Dial by Name Directory app on don't handle text to speech very well, especially when it comes to people's names. However, since we recently installed a Voxeo VoiceXML Browser into our network - we have a whole new world of options.

We immediately grabbed the Vox-Attendant application from RocketSource, the open source VoiceXML project and loaded it up on our Voxeo platform. Within minutes, we were able to start testing a fully speech enabled Dial by Name directory.

Now, this isn't to say that we're ready to go live. The app has some limitations - it doesn't hook into our user database, requires manual configuration and isn't multi-tenant (which means it only can support one customer at a time). However, it's a great start and gives us a template to work off of.

We believe that we're building a great Hosted PBX, but we know that there are other great developers out there who are making innovative apps that our customers can use. Using standards such as SIP, VoiceXML and CCXML makes it easier to integrate and offer these applications - in this case, we went from downloading to deploying in under an hour.

Have a voice or telephony app that you want to test against our network? Just drop us a line at apps@junctionnetworks.com.