Nu Echo Blog

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.

On September 16th, I will be giving a joint Developer Jam Session with Tobias Göbel from Voxeo on Advanced Speech Grammar Management with the professional edition of NuGram IDE on the VoiceObjects platform. In this talk, I will explain the main differences between NuGram IDE Basic Edition and the Professional Edition. More precisely, I will cover the following topics:

• Advanced sentence generation and coverage
• Batch tools to test and convert your grammars at application build time
• The automatic builder
• The NuGram Server SDK

and more. I will also give an overview of the NuGram roadmap for the upcoming months. Finally, Tobias will talk about the integration with the VoiceObjects environment.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about NuGram IDE Professional Edition!

Here are the slides from my SpeechTEK 2009 presentation on grammar coverage analysis. Since part of the presentation was in the form of interactive demos, I will soon post screencasts to complement those slides. Stay tuned!