Dialogic's Dworkin to Address Open Source Community

Jeff Dworkin is a recognized pioneer in the Voice Processing and Internet Telephony (News - Alert) industries. He co-founded Interface Alternative (later renamed iFace.com) in 1992 and implemented some of the first commercial grade IVR systems that included Speech Recognition, Speaker Verification and Text-To-Speech systems for use in the banking, transportation, retail, health care services, and entertainment industries.

 

Currently, Jeff serves as enterprise marketing manager at Dialogic (News - Alert).

 

Dworkin will be speaking at the upcoming AstriCon Open Source Telephony Conference & Exhibition in Glendale, AZ September 22–25. He will present a session entitled Human Factors in Voice Interface Design at the conference. I had the chance to ask Dworkin some questions regarding the content of his presentation as well as what Dialogic is up to in the Open Source space.

 

 

JD: Dialogic provides premium products for the open source market (software, boards and Media Gateways), however, rather than do yet another product focused presentation, we felt that we could better server the open source community by sharing some valuable experience that we have gained in the 20+ years that we have been participating in this market.

 

While, open-source has made it possible for nearly anyone with a bit of development background to create a telecom application or add telecom functionality to a business process, open source does not help developers make usable TUIs (telephony user interfaces). This presentation will discuss the details of designing application interfaces that need to be used in a “listen only” mode. This discussion will include good prompt design, application flow and menu design for both DTMF and ASR implementation.

 

JD: We are hoping to announce a number of new initiatives to enable more of our products for use by the open source community.

 

JD: Currently our entire Dialogic Diva line of boards can be used with asterisk through our chan_dialogicdiva.

 

As the open source market continues to evolve, we continue to see rising demand for our product in this space.

 

JD: While open source presents a low barrier to entry for companies that want to begin developing products and solutions in this space, it is important for these companies to consider their “end game” plan as well. If they plan to build a truly scalable solution, or if they plan to achieve worldwide distribution of the solution, they have to make sure that their hardware provider can properly support their efforts over time.

 

JD: Again, that low barrier to entry is very attractive. Also, the fact that Asterisk allows most anyone with some development background to build Voice Applications or to create solutions with for Communication Enabled Business Processes is very attractive.

 

JD: Of course, we are hoping that enabling other Dialogic products to be more easily used by open source developers will cause the biggest trend in the next 12 months.  In addition, we feel that a number of open source telephony projects are gaining traction in the market. While some may view these as competitors to Asterisk, we believe that this will spur competition and drive technical innovation in the space.