Good news Skype users!!!, they have recently introduced a unlimited plan for just $9.95. User can call internationally to 34 countries world wide. I am sure this will spurn all providers in this arena. You can now call to your relatives all over the world by spending $9.95.

Hold on, like all other providers, Skype also have some hidden things in the unlimited plan. It is not actually unlimited, restricted around to 10000 minutes. I think its more than enough for international calls for a month. Actually the cost is $12.25/month, but if you purchase a package for 3 or 12 months you will offered a 33% discount. The offer is valid till June 1’st 2008. So hurry up and grab this offer.

Skype already merchandised their products all over US and Canada. How ever still lagging very much behind in Indian markets, where the real tech geeks and internet enthusiast resides. Yes this plan is not applicable for Indians .

Apple released iPhone SDK, Now its gonna heaven for developers to write there own applications. The SDK does support all the features available in iPhone. The SDK have an emulator for testing your application. We can develop application and licensed upon apple’s agreement.

Register your account @ mac, download SDK and start developing application.

VoiceXML is a technology used to recognize speech patterns in web oriented content delivery IVR applications. For example if a site xyz.com, a site that provide all kind of information about a state. We can create a application so that when a user call to a number lets say 1234, call will be landed to the site xyz.com. Since xyz.com provide contents of a particular state you can ask temperature of the particular state by saying a keyword “temperature”. The user get temperature of the particular state as response.

We can build IVR using asterisk IVR framework with-in 5 minutes. What if we can integrate the voice pattern for IVR flow, its cool idea ? A lot of software are there but almost all are very costly and not much simple. Here is a solution for this, The SpeakRight Framework.

SpeakRight Framework is an open source java framework. We can develop speech recognition applications. Using this framework we can build voice based IVR application in asterisk IVR framework. We can use both the SpeakRight framework and phpagi to build voice based IVR with asterisk. The framework use code based approaches. Let me explain what is code based approach with an example. A lot of IVR application are UI based applications so that a normal user can define the IVR logic by simply drag dropping components. But when the IVR logic become complicated its very hard to understand if we develop using visual programming languages. But we can simply develop any complicated IVR using dailplan. The dialplan use code based approach since we do code the IVR logic using simple functions. Like wise SpeakRight  are also using same logic for recognizing speech patterns.

Let me explain how to integrate in the architecture diagram below.

I will soon come back with the implementation

Fastalerts the best online alerts solution. User can send sms, email’s and voice alerts (on demand) using easy interface which have a feel of desktop application. The performance for sms sending are comparatively very high compared to other online applications. Fastalerts is an effective online solution that create value to its customers.

The main features includes

• Create and manage users online.
• Send alerts single or group wise.
• Provide bulk sms in india.
• Sub accounts creation and management which are helpful for enterprise.
• We can send 15K sms in a single click which no online system delivers.
• Reseller support.

There are some plan to fully open up voice solution to all customers. Probably it will happen in the next version. The application is fully AJAX based so that end user get a feeling of desktop application. The fastalerts have a 24×7 online chat support and customer support available. One of the main feature of fastalerts include its reseller support. So that anyone can become a reseller.

The fastalerts have around 5000 user sign up which is very big. The application is powered by mobme the fastest growing mobile media and entertainment company. I am so happy to say that i played a key role in fastalerts application development. I was the chief technology architect for that product.