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A Denver, CO telephony application developer, Powderfone.com, has release a cool application for hungover ski-bums who want up to the minute information on optimal skiing conditions. The Powderfone service is powered by Asterisk Open Source PBX, and showcases the uniqueness and flexibility of Asterisk.

Powderfone.com offers a free snow report wake-up telephone call service to skiers and snowboarders for 1,200 resorts worldwide.

Subscribers choose how much snow, which days, which resorts, and at what time they would like to receive a wake up call. When a resort gets the snowfall a subscriber has requested, they will receive a phone call like this:

RING RING … …Wake Up. PowderFone has good news for you! Copper Mountain received 12 inches of new powder at 5:11am as reported by ski patrol. Press 1 to listen to the avalanche report. Visit coppercolorado.com for more information.

“We started this a few years ago and now have a list of top North American resorts branding our services and offering it to their customers,” says Kelly Taylor, PowderFone Co Founder. This season PowderFone will surpass 100,000 wake up calls in their 4 year history.

PowderFone continues to develop new ways for resorts and riders to hook up. This season, a new product called “Weekend Warrior” will be launched in limited resorts in the Midwest and Eastern U.S delivering weekly phone updates of conditions, events and lodging deals to skiers and riders. The PowderCast, a podcast and blog run by PowderFone’s University of Colorado Interns is produced every month. To signup for PowderFone visit www.powderfone.com.
SOURCE PowderFone

With the release of Trixbox 2.0, small businesses can take advantage of speech recognition technology from Lumenvox, a provided powerful, full-featured, and affordable speech recognition software since 2001.

“Many businesses need speech recognition software,” said Andrew Gillis, founder of trixbox and director of community development at Fonality. “trixbox is all about adding new capabilities to our platform and we are happy to integrate with LumenVox in the new 2.0 version of trixbox.”

“With this integration with trixbox 2.0, we are bringing point-and-click installation and management of LumenVox speech recognition to the trixbox community. One of our goals as a company is to popularize the use of speech recognition technology across a variety of markets, and the trixbox 2.0 platform and its users are clearly in line with that mission,” said Gerd Graumann, director of business development at LumenVox.

Speech recognition is particularly useful to enhance traditional, DTMF driven IVR (Interactive Voice Response) applications, such as multi-level auto attendant menus. With speech recognition, a caller does not need to input numeric information on the telephone keypad, they can simply speak and the recognition engine interprets the user’s voice command, and proceeds accordingly. For example, a caller presented with a traditional autoattendant might be instructed to “Press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer service, press 3 for technical support.” With speech recognition, the same caller might be presented with instructions such as, “To reach our sales department say “Sales”, for customer service say “Customer Service”, for technical support say “Support”. In today’s mobile workforce, speech recognition is particularly convenient for mobile phone users, who can navigate autoattendants and IVR menus by voice, with no need to press buttons on the telephony keypad.

Formerly Asterisk@Home, Trixbox is becoming a popular choice for companies looking to implement Asterisk who do not have much Linux experience, and are uncomfortable dealing with the Asterisk CLI (Command Line Interface). Trixbox features an intuitive GUI (Graphic User Interface), which shortens the learning curve for Asterisk dramatically. The LumenVox Speech Engine is the core speech recognition technology that handles the recognition of words and phrases, and features an easy “Point-and-Click” installation.

LumenVox’s Speech Engine is a flexible API that performs speech recognition on audio data from any audio source. The Speech Engine is speaker and hardware independent on both Windows and Linux platforms.

It provides speech application developers with an efficient development and runtime platform, allowing for dynamic language, grammar, audio format, and logging capabilities to customize every step of their application. Grammars are entered as a simple list of words or pronunciations, or in the industry standard Speech Recognition Grammar Specification.

Lumenvox Speech Engine Functionality Includes:

• Streaming Audio
• Support for English, Latin American Spanish, and Canadian French.
• Flexible API easily integrates into current OA&M, billing, provisioning, and debugging systems.
• Client/Server architecture distributes speech-processing load.
• Runtime defined grammars entered as simple text, BNF, raw phonetic spelling or SRGS.
• Advanced dynamic barge-in adapts to each call in real time.
• SDK includes examples of demo apps.
• Flexible error recovery through the use of confidence scores and NBest results.
  

Fonality and trixbox are registered trademarks of Fonality. Asterisk is a registered trademark of Digium. LumenVox is a registered trademark.

I arrived in San Diego yesterday for the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo. Posting this week will be plentiful, but a bit sporadic, as the schedules and events of a trade show throw-off the typical day. Look for some great news, stories, and commentary this week!

The first round of site updates have been completed! I would call this version, Smith On VoIP 1.5. Over the next few weeks I will be adding a host of new features, tools, and content, in an attempt to build-out the Smith On VoIP community and deliver some of the things that many of you have emailed me about over the past three months. I would like to thank all of you for your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions….keep them coming.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett

Happy 4th of July to all of you here in the states!

Garrett

ClearOne’s new Maxx IP, a SIP based desktop conference station will allow for more choice in a product vertical that is currently dominated by the Polycom IP4000. The MaxxAttach comes with (2) Maxx IP conference stations and the solution is scalable up to (4) units.

“ClearOne continues to break new ground in the tabletop conferencing space,” said Zee Hakimoglu, President and CEO of ClearOne. “We created the concept of attaching conference phones together for vastly improved room coverage and user control, and remain the only company that offers that capability. We were also first to market with a wireless conference phone, and the first and only company to offer a completely wireless dual-unit conference phone solution.” “Now, with the addition of MAXAttach IP and MAX IP to our tabletop product lineup, ClearOne is the only company to offer a VoIP conference phone solution with that same capability to daisy-chain up to four phones for unrivaled tabletop conferencing performance. Our enterprise customers are asking more frequently for VoIP solutions from ClearOne, and these products are our first answer to that request.” “With respect to our VoIP strategy, we evaluated the market, and determined that a SIP-based platform was the right direction to take. The momentum of SIP-based telephony offerings from other industry players clearly validates that decision,” continued Hakimoglu.

Although enthusiastic about the ability to offer additional choice; what is really exciting is the possibility of a stand alone wireless conference phone from ClearOne. ClearOne already offers analog Maxx Wireless line of desktop conferencing phones.

Garrett Smith