Written by Ron Tanner
We just got back from Microsoft’s TechEd Conference in Orlando, Florida USA.* We had a good time hearing about new Microsoft products and technologies, and listening to some of the information sessions. However, our main purpose was to exhibit our products at the TechEd Show.
We talked with and met a lot of great people. Often I would get asked if we had an end product that handled a certain specific function (for example, a ready-built conference application, or call recording function).
We would often explain that the beauty of Voice Elements is that we make it easy to build any type of Voice Application that you need.
Unfortunately, many people are still intimidated by building their own voice applications, and don’t realize how easy it can be to write your own custom telephony application.
So Why Should You Develop Your Own Voice Application?
Here are just a few great reasons to consider:
Total Control
You’ll have total control to make changes as you see fit. You can be responsive to customer requests and grow in exciting new directions.
Ease of Use
Voice Elements was written from the ground up to make voice application development easy for .NET developers. In many cases you can re-use business logic from other .NET applications at your business and use it with Voice Elements.
For example, I worked at a large company with several thousand employees. There were custom built .NET DLL’s to handle all sorts of functionality from Security to querying employee organizations charts. A .NET developer at my old company could easily develop a conference application that used an existing .NET DLL so that a supervisor could automatically dial all of his direct reports — try doing that with off the shelf software!
Serious Cost Savings
Many off the shelf products (such as dialers, or other applications) require you to purchase 3rd party telephony software to be installed in addition to the price of their end product. These 3rd party products often cost twice as much as Voice Elements Platform. For more detail about these cost savings, see our article Develop Voice Applications at Half the Cost: From the Beginning at Inventive Labs.
Flexibility
Because Voice Elements is written in .NET, you can do anything that you can do in C# or VB.NET.
Support
We strive to have the best technical support in the industry. If you run into issues, or aren’t quite sure how to perform a certain function, feel free to let us know at support@inventivelabs.com. We are always happy to lend a hand.
* TechEd was Microsoft’s first annual conference for developers and IT professionals held March 9 – 12, 1993 in Orlando, Florida.