Regrettably, SpeechTek and VoiceCon overlap 100% on the days they are being held this year. Since I cover the same areas that both these shows do, my decision to go to VoiceCon, instead of SpeechTek, is based entirely on the formula of “pay lots of money to fly to New York for four days, or sleep in my own bed and drive to San Francisco.” All I can say now, is “oh rats!”, as Syntellect put out a press release Tuesday about having a sneak peek at a new product they are introducing, that alleges to solve many of the issues I brought up in my testing blog last week.
So this is what showed up on the business wire, and pardon me for the cut and paste -
“PHOENIX --(Business Wire)-- Aug. 7, 2007 Complete testing and error-free applications are now possible with a revolutionary breakthrough that will be unveiled on Monday, August 20th, at the SpeechTEK East show in New York City. The platform independent product, Voiyager - Dynamic Application Discovery, is a technology that will fundamentally change how VoiceXML applications are designed, tested, deployed, and ultimately maintained.”
"We set out to solve the age old problem of software quality, in particular within our industry fully testing VXML applications end to end to ensure first time quality," said Jim Rush, Syntellect's Lead Architect. "The result is a highly innovative technology breakthrough that aligns with the application development lifecycle to provide continuous testing, ongoing analysis, as well as pinpoint problem identification and resolution for VXML applications - real-time."
Voiyager requires no set-up: simply point it at the URL and explore. With no professional service requirements, and elimination of the Telephony and ASR infrastructure investment and setup, testing can happen early and often. Voiyager highlights include:
• Dynamic Application Discovery - automatically determines what the VoiceXML does - from start to finish across EVERY path.
• Complete visual call flow of the application highlighting and categorizing suspect behavior and call states
• Problem Analysis - User interface to assess, review and troubleshoot problem states
• Regression Testing - thorough evaluation and testing of all changes to your application between explorations for quality assurance
• Soft Phone Interface - call interaction component that provides customized bookmarks that reevaluate an application component without the need to retest an entire application.”
OK then. So I called them. They told me a whole bunch of stuff along with caveats about how I would ruin their SpeechTek party if I wrote the equivalent of a white paper on Voiyager in my blog. Rats again.
Let’s suffice it to say that if Voiyager does everything they say it does, at the light speed they claim it works at, applications developers are going to be really happy. I’ll report back later when I actually get to see it.
PS – I was only kidding about the “oh rats” part. I hear there are lots of goodies being announced at VoiceCon.