Nu Echo Blog

Following a well-established tradition, Nu Echo held its annual corporate day on Friday, October 23rd. Although our blog often addresses very serious subjects (!), fun is a very strong component of our corporate culture and our corporate day wonderfully illustrates that.

The event began at 11:30AM with (way too many) pizzas and a presentation from our CEO, Yves Normandin. This was the first corporate event in our new office.

We then took our cars and headed for the Action 500 Karting center, where we had a hard time trying to beat Yves and Christophe Furet, our VP Finance. It’s amazing how much adrenalin we can get from those small toy-like karts.

We ended the day with the medal ceremony (!), a cold beer and some chips.

Thanks to Christophe and Pascal Deschênes for taking those superb photos!

In order to ease the integration of dynamic grammars hosted on NuGram Hosted Server, the NuGram team has developed client APIs in a variety of programming languages. The code is available on Github, but a zip file can be downloaded directly from the NuGram web site.

Supported languages/systems are currently:

• Java
• JavaScript (more specifically the ECMAScript rhino interpreter)
• Python 2.5/2.6 and Jython 2.5
• Ruby
• Clojure
• Erlang
• pure VoiceXML 2.1

And there are more to come.

Using these APIs, it becomes really easy to create dynamically-generated grammars for use by your favorite hosted communication platform (be it a VoiceXML platform or one of the many new API-based platforms), or compute the semantic interpretation of a textual sentencehe following grammar template.

An example

Suppose we’d like to implement a simple voice dialing application. A dynamic grammar template (called voicedialer.abnf) for this application would look like the following:

To get a valid recognition grammar from this template, we need to provide data to the template engine (in this case the contact list) to fill in the blanks using call-specific information. This is called instantiating the dynamic grammar.

So to instantiate the template above and retrieve the URL for the SRGS XML representation of the generated grammar in Ruby, only four lines of code are needed:

As can be seen in this example, data used by the templating engine to create the resulting grammar is specified using native data structures of the host language (Ruby dictionaries/hashmaps in this case).

Adding dynamic grammars to voice applications has never been easier! All you need is register for a free account on NuGram Hosted Server and download the APIs.

We are proud to announce that the NuBot Testing Platform Beta 2 is now live and being used by the first beta program participants. As a reminder, during the NuBot Beta 2 Program, the NuBot Platform is available free of charge as a SaaS solution through the NuBot Hosting Service.

Automated testing should be considered a critical component of any rigorous development process. The NuBot Platform has been designed to address key limitations of existing IVR testing solutions. With NuBot:

• No programming skills are required to build test scenarios
• Numerous and varied test scenarios can be developed quickly and easily, even for large and complex applications
• Maintenance of test scenarios is facilitated thanks to built-in robustness to application changes
• A fully integrated suite of analysis tools are available to facilitate diagnosis of test failures.

To learn more about the NuBot Automated IVR Application Testing Platform or to enlist as a Beta Program participant, please contact us.

It’s been exactly six months since we released NuGram IDE Basic Edition to the developer community. We thought this was a good time to ask for some feedback from all users out there.

Whatever your experience has been with NuGram so far, we want to hear from you. Please let us know what you think by taking the NuGram User Survey. It will only take a few minutes of your time and it will help us make NuGram a better product.