Six years ago (almost to the day) I wrote an advisory about Tropo  in which I referred to the newly launched subsidiary as  “Voxeo’s Telco in Legoland.” I noted that “Voxeo is offering a free service to voice application developers to take advantage of a standard API and a growing range of ‘frameworks’ for the application community to build more voice and telephony applications in the cloud – what it refers to as ‘API-based’ applications.” Today, with the announcement of Tropo Connect, the group will further whet the developer community’s appetite for construct-your-own applications and services, and give end-users new types of agility by invoking or launching “InCall Apps.”

The whole “InCall” concept is a little hard to grasp, initially, because most telephone and voice application development starts “outside” the actual call. As Tropo’s CTO and co-founder Jose de Castro explained to me, “It’s not an ‘app first’ model. Instead it says take the call processing capabilities you have and put apps in it.” de Castro is referring to the fact that traditional “apps” live on a phone or on application servers that provide their instructions and programmatic logic to the call processing, voice processing and data processing resources. IVRs (Interactive Voice Response units), ACDs (Automated Call Directors) and Conference Bridges are the physical examples of these “engines,” but they are becoming artifacts of the pre-Internet days and have largely been replaced by software on generic servers.

Even if  applications reside in the same “cloud” or run on the same server, they do not traditionally run “inside” a call. That’s why the home screens on so many smart phones are emblazoned with dozens or scores of icons used to “launch” individual applications to carry on specific tasks.

To make the point, think of the benefits of launching apps while in the middle of a phone call. A simple example occurs whenever a Skype user adds another user to a conference call or when a contact center agent can receive a “whisper” prompt when engaged in a conversation with a customer or prospect. Use of the Tropo platform gives “developers,” be they the shadow IT department in a large enterprise or an independent entrepreneur just showing off, the agility to define new voice mash-ups – meaning InCall apps that span business applications, control of the Internet of Things or conversational control and communications in automobiles.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence

Tags: Tropo, Mobile Experience, Over-the-top, Intelligent Assistance, InCall apps