Thomas Howe - http://www.thomashowe.com

Writing Voice Mashups

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Agenda

• Introduce the After Hours Doctor’s Office

• Scenario

• The goals of the Mashup

• Introduce the architecture

• Go over every component

• Functionality, interface, code

• Give you some ingredients, ideas

• What this isn’t

• A complete, and coherent, application

• Utterly scalable, but surprisingly close

• What is this?

• Think of Lewis and Clark

• Today’s telephony is very far from this. Very far.

• With a bit of luck, this is tomorrow’s telephony

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After Hours Doctor’s Office

• Mashup written specifically for the Contest• I quit my job because I was technically bothered

• Goals• Show you the money

• Explore the use of Amazon Turks in Telephony Mashups

• Demonstrate the effects of modern Web technologies in telephony applications

• Resources• Me, 40 hours and a PowerMac G5 Server

• TellMe Studio - Voice XML hosting

• Strike-Iron - SMS Messaging

• Amazon Web Services - Amazon Mechanical Turks

• Web Hosting Provider - PHP and Ruby on Rails

• Source and commentary available at thomashowe.com

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Application Scenario

• Mr. Kraus feels sick, calls Dr. McCarthy• After hours - no one’s there.

• Decision to make - emergency room? Tomorrow?

• Application takes voice mail message• Forwards into pool of Amazon Turk Nurses

• SMS messages increase reaction time for small service

• Immediately responds to patient - constant feedback

• Turk Nurse determines urgency• Listens to the message, summarizes and forwards

• Application gives direction to patient• Routine? A message from nurse reassuring patient

• Urgent? A call from the Doctor, right away

• Benefits?• Faster, cheaper with a higher quality of care

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The Money

• Where is the money?• 50 million unnecessary emergency room visits in the US

• Each costs about $900.00 more than a doctor’s office visit

• Where isn’t the money?• Customer education that the service exists

• Repeated marketing to habituate the service

• Costly market trials

• Why?• Integration of real time communications into the business

process makes it more efficient, saving money for the enterprise and increasing customer satisfaction

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Amazon Turks

• Internet Scale Workforce• One doctor needs 1/10 of a nurse

• One thousand doctors needs 100.

• More use, more turks, faster service

• Practical? Absolutely• Nurses get $3.00 for three minutes work == $60/hour

• Down time, family time, sick time, whatever

• Off-shoring?

• Comprehensive Quality• Amazon Turks automatically

• Record urgency accuracy, compare history

• Transcriptions

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Bringing a knife to a gun fight…

• What did I use?• 40 hours, web services and a rapidly aging geek

• Ruby on Rails, SOA, PHP

• $25.00 to Strike Iron, and I’d probably have to pay x cents a minute to TellMe, Angel, or Voxeo

• What did I not use?• Big Iron ==> NO LARGE INVESTMENT

• A Contract ==> NO CARRIER INVOLVEMENT

• Marketing ==> NO CUSTOMER EDUCATION

• Risk ==> NO LONG DEVELOPMENT CYCLES

• Traditional carriers will get their clocks cleaned.

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After Hours Mashup Architecture

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VoiceXML

• Accepts inbound phone calls with rich media experience• Voice detection, ASR, IVR, recording audio

• Use CCXML from Voxeo for outdial operations

• May be blended with other voice applications

• Standards Compliant Operation• I can choose among hosted options, local platform

• Little lock in

• Records audio and posts it to Web Server• Store it, record it, play it

• Web Server can produce VoiceXML files to play• Stateful processing

• Many choices for hosted providers• TellMe, Voxeo

• Some have platform/hosted options

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After Hours Mashup Architecture

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Uploader.php

• PHP file for accepting inbound request• Called by VoiceXML file

• Handles uploading voice files, data

• Calls shell scripts to issue SMS requests

• Returns VoiceXML files back• Could be dynamic; template procesing

• Complete integration with other Web Tech• Database integration

• Instant Messaging and Presence Information

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After Hours Mashup Architecture

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Strike Iron SMS

• Web Service to send text messages

• One of many online, paid services

• Reverse phone number lookup

• Address verification, currency rate, background check

• Pay per click model

• First 100 clicks are free, small fee thereafter

• 168 characters per message

• User interface issues

• URL issues (TinyURL)

• Extraordinarily Powerful

• Ubiquitous

• Immediate

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After Hours Mashup Architecture

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Amazon Web Services

• Amazon Mechanical Turks• Human Intelligence Tasks

• Things that humans can do easily, difficult for computers

• A9 Search Engine

• Artificial Artificial Intelligence• It’s now OK to cheat

• Humans become subroutines

• S3, EC2 have unique telephony implications• Mr. Erlang never worked for Amazon

• True defense against DDOS

• S3 == linear scalability == holy grail of telephony

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After Hours Mashup Architecture

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

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Extensions

• Call Centers• Expert based call centers, makes response even faster

• Better for larger scale installations

• Integrates well with Amazon Turks

• Geolocation• Give the data right to the nurse, showing hospitals, medical

centers, etc.

• Combines well with text messages (text directions)

• Get location from reverse phone number lookup, zip code from VxML, GPS inside phone, or all of the above for fraud detection

• Medical Transcriptions to Testing• Use medical transcriptions to check for consistency,

accuracy, training.

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Call Center : Sylantro

• Integrating with Sylantro switch• Accepts inbound calls into expert queue

• Nurses login to the system from soft client or PSTN phone

• Turks are used to manage larger schedules

• Even better response for patient• Nurse is right there to answer questions

• Use VoiceXML to do pre-processing, skills based routing

• SOAP based interface using Java

• Better choice for larger setups• Dedicated equipment, staff

• Other functionality• Conferencing in Doctor or other expert

• Past history integration with CRM for accuracy

• Click to dial for post care support through e-mail

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Yahoo! Local

• Nurses page shows location of caller• Location derived from inbound calling info

• Alternatives are GPS, asked

• Gives nurse immediate information to share with patient• Nearest clinic, hospital, etc.

• Directions; call ahead; 911 conference

• Flash based API• Many APIs available… this was wicked simple to use

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Thank you!!!

For more information, source code, and this presentation,

see my site at

thomashowe.com