With an objective to make telephony functions accessible through a common web platform, Ozonetel Systems, a provider of 'cloud telephony' technology in India, has unveiled the next version of Kookoo.in, Kookoo Telephony 2.0, India's first hosted telephony platform in the cloud. The latest version now allows businesses to interact with their customers by integrating incoming and outgoing SMS.

According to Ozonetel, KooKoo is an interface or an application interface program (API) between a user’s web application and the caller. It takes phone commands from the user and executes them on user’s behalf to the caller. With user’s, the web page is accessible from the phone rather than the browser.

Featuring "Pay per use" model, the KooKoo takes advantage of user’s existing web development skills to build telephony apps. When a caller calls the KooKoo number, the API informs user’s application. Once the user provides inputs in the form of text or voice record, the API performs the action on your user’s behalf and sends the result of the action to the user’s application.

Precisely, Kookoo functions as an interface between the web application and the caller by taking phone commands from one end (caller) and executes on the web.

With Kookoo Telephony 2.0, the API not only allows businesses to build innovative phone applications, but also provides another channel for businesses to interact with their customers by integrating incoming and out going SMS.

With the SMS channel enabled, KooKoo now offers 10 digit numbers so that customers can send SMSes to the businesses who are leasing this platform, said officials with Ozonetel.

In addition, the Kookoo.in API also provides a way of telephony functions for web programmers to enable web/e-commerce sites to offer telephone channel as a mechanism to service customers.

CSN Murthy, founder and CEO, Ozonetel Systems, said in a statement, "Even though India is the second largest and the fastest growing telecom market in the world today, with over 740 million telephone users, we have only 50 million Internet users.”

Murthy added, “We realized that Telephony systems have lagged behind because of exorbitant setup costs and maintaining them. We saw an opportunity to develop a system that addresses this problem by making telephony functions accessible through common web programming languages.”

Further quoting about the API, Murthy added, “Today, we are happy and confident that advanced version of kookoo.in helps the company's with web based companies to scale up their business through telephony"

Available in key centers like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune and more, KooKoo users can get local numbers from all these locations and build their voice services like IVR and PBX (News - Alert) systems, said officials with Ozonetel.

Since its launch in August 2010, Kookoo has earned 1,000 registered developers and 100 customers who have built voice services such as IVR and PBX systems.

In March, Ozonetel Systems partnered with India’s first “Startup Weekend” event in Bangalore, to encourage the development of voice based cloud telephony applications in the country, reported TMCnet.