Voxeo

» see voxeo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Voxeo sold to developers, which is the one audience on this site I actually belong to, and I still never opened an account. The reason is dull. I have never had a reason to build something that answers a telephone. That was the entire market, and for about a decade it was a market with real money in it and almost no consumer surface.

Jonathan Taylor started the company in Orlando in 1999 with a premise that sounds obvious now and was strange then. A phone call is a session. A session can be described in a markup file. If you can write a web page you should be able to write a phone menu, and the phone company should not get a vote in it. VoiceXML was the W3C standard that made the argument formally, and Voxeo built the platform that made it cheap.

The free tier is the part worth remembering. Voxeo Evolution gave you a developer account, a real telephone number and somewhere to host the file it pointed at, and it did not ask for money. In 2005 that was close to unimaginable. Getting a phone number that did something programmable normally meant a telco contract and a salesperson who wanted to talk about annual minimums.

The rest of the company was ordinary enterprise software. Prophecy was the IVR platform, VoiceObjects handled multi-channel service design and was later renamed CXP, and PRISM was the application server underneath all of it. Voxeo also bought about a dozen small companies between 2005 and 2010, including Motorola's VoiceXML browser business in 2009, which is the kind of purchase that tells you who was walking away from the category.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

If you called an American airline or a bank between roughly 2003 and 2013 and the robot understood you, there was a decent chance Voxeo was underneath. It never said so. Platform businesses are anonymous by design: the customer's brand goes on the voice, the vendor's name goes on the invoice. Voxeo was doing about fifty million dollars a year by the end, which is a real company and still small enough that nobody outside the industry could name it.

Tropo was the second act and the more interesting one. Launched in 2009 as a cloud API you could hit from any language, it let you place a call or send a text message in a few lines of code, which is the same shape Twilio built a public company out of. Voxeo had the technology and it had the developers, and it did not turn that into the thing Twilio turned it into.

~ the actual end ~

Aspect Software announced the deal on 10 July 2013 and closed it on 26 July, at a reported hundred and fifty million dollars. Aspect ran contact centers, needed a self-service story, and bought one. Tropo was carved out at the same moment and continued on its own; Cisco acquired it in 2015.

The brand did not die on the closing date so much as stop being maintained. Aspect shipped Voxeo CXP Pro 14 in May 2014 with the old name still on the box and then quietly stopped using it. voxeo.com served its own site until the spring of 2016 and after that only redirected. Aspect renamed itself Alvaria in 2021, so the name that swallowed Voxeo has since been swallowed too.

~ the long tail ~

VoiceXML is still out there, running lines you call without thinking about them, but nobody starts a new system in it. The category Voxeo built for got replaced twice: first by cloud communication APIs that made a phone call one HTTP request, then by assistants that removed the menu altogether. What survives is the assumption Voxeo was arguing for in 1999, which is that telephony is just another protocol and a developer should be allowed near it.

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