Technology summary

The technical term for our service is Video IVR. You are probably familiar with regular IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, which is commonly used for telephone applications such as banking. Typically you respond to voice prompts by pressing a number on your keypad. Now imagine the same thing on a 3G video phone.

3G phones are well known for their ability to make person-to-person video calls. In that scenario, a camera on one handset generates a video stream that is sent to the other handset. Our service does the same thing, except the video stream is computer-generated and displays an interactive application.

How does it work?

A 3G video call is just like a regular voice call, except that the contents are a specially-encoded digital stream rather than voice data. These calls are routed to our server where they are automatically answered.

Each phone number handled by our server refers to a VIXML document. The document may be hosted on the server or anywhere else on the internet. It describes what will be displayed on your phone - text, images, sound, video, even synthesised speech. It also specifies what happens when you press a DTMF key (0-9, *, #).

Sounds a lot like HTML, doesn't it? Well, if you can put together an HTML web site you should have no trouble writing a VIXML application.