Rubyology 85: Teleku, cloud telecom

Chris Matthieu introduces his new cloud-based telecom start-up written in Ruby on Rails called Teleku.com!

Teleku is a new cloud-based telecom service that allows Web developers to build and host phone applications that answer inbound calls and initiate outbound calls, interact with Web applications, and send/receive SMS text messages! Using simple XML and JSON responses in your HTTP Web pages, you can deliver sophisticated interactive voice response (IVR) telephony applications in as little as 5 minutes!

The Teleku platform runs phone applications written in PhoneML®, Twilio’s® TwiML®, and traditional VoiceXML. You can even mix XML libraries on a Web service call-by-call basis and chain voice applets together using one or all of the three libraries.

Teleku natively uses Phone Markup Language (PhoneML) to build powerful phone applications quickly and easily. PhoneML can be viewed as a modern and more simple approach to building XML/JSON-based telephony applications. PhoneML is a set of RESTful XML/JSON commands that allow developers to build simple yet sophisticated phone applications using any Web programming language. We mask the complexities of building a traditional voice application by providing you with a easy Web Service API that handles the complex telco services and even Speech Recognition (ASR) grammar development.

Teleku’s API does not require you to purchase an SDK or download software but rather provides free RESTful Web Services that allow your Web applications to receive telephone, Skype, and SIP calls to interact with callers over the telephone like traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems by playing MP3, WAV, or VOX media files, speaking text-to-speech (TTS) prompts, collecting digits and spoken commands through speech recognition (ASR), recording audio, dialing numbers, transferring calls, etc.

Teleku is hosted in the cloud (specifically Amazon’s EC2 platform) allowing us to scale your phone application from one to thousands of simultaneous calls in the blink of an eye!

Never has building an Interactive Voice Response (IVR/VRU) system been so simple, affordable, and powerful! “We are excited to see what developers will build with this kind of new technology,” says its founder, Chris Matthieu. This is definitely next generation telecom! Cloud-based computing allows us to scale on demand and it allows you to pay for only what you need, when you need it.

We are issuing Private Beta invitation codes a few at a time to ensure that our services are meeting your expectations. Please follow Teleku on Twitter and @ reply us if you are interested in giving your app a ring!