i6net.com please to announce a new important feature for voice & video services over our next release of VXI* 5.1: Flash/RTMP for Asterisk / VXI* is an add-on channel driver for Asterisk-based PBX systems. Adding Flash/RTMP for Asterisk to any Asterisk server enables complete access to manage bi-directional video calls from a Web browser with a Flash player.

Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet, between a Flash player and a server. Adobe Flash, is the industry-leading web application environment, present in web browsers on 99% of the world’s computers. Flash can access the webcam and microphone on a PC and works through any firewall.

[post by Allison Smith on Digium.com]

About a year ago, I recorded an IVR for a small independent dry cleaning business – not really a Mom and Pop company; they were located in outlets across three States, and were doing very well – they prided themselves on fitting in seamlessly into the communities they served and they were at just the right size for their comfort level. When I recorded their system, a request for a total re-record came in (never a good thing) but their reason for the redo was unique and sticks with me to this day: my usual professional tone was seen as too “highbrow” for them. Created too much of a “big company” impression. They didn’t want to be “Martinizing”; they wanted to sound “local”….friendly….and accessible.

The final VXI* VoiceXML browser 5.0  ref. 2010-05-21 32bit and 64bit is now released. This new release is suitable for production platforms running with all lastest Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6 kernels (both Asterisk’s packages are available for download too). Like our previous release, VXI* 5.0 has been built to run over Asterisk EC2 or Xen virtual servers. Stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date on our progress or check out our lasts builds.

You can download these new binary packages from this website for registered users.

LumenVox version 9.5 is available, and with it comes drastically improved confidence scoring. If you are unfamiliar with confidence scores, they provide a representation of how confident the Speech Engine is that an answer is correct.

The higher the score, the more likely the result from the Engine matches what the user said. A lower score means the answer is less reliable. This is useful when asking users to confirm what they said. If you receive a low confidence score, you can confirm what was said. A high score means you can just assume that the answer is correct and not waste the user's time.