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VoIP Business Weekly

As the VoIP ecosystem starts to flesh out, companies such as Angel.com are providing enterprises and small businesses with easy-to-use tools to develop voice applications. "Using Angel's online development tool, customers can build speech recognition applications in minutes or hours, not months," says company CEO Mike Zirngibl. "Even small businesses can do this themselves, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars."

In fact, since mid-2002, "several hundred customers have built their own applications," says Zirngibl. About 1,400 business customers use Angel every day to answer their calls and about half of all customers use it as a virtual receptionist. Zirngibl says.

And while the customer base includes lots of small, five-person professional services firms, Alcoa, Kellogg, Buca di Beppo, Deutsche Bank, Reebok, GiftCards.com, and KB Toys also are customers.

Angel also provides hosted PBX services, but the big draw is the Site Builder development wizard, used to create interactive voice response (IVR) applications. After signing up for the hosted service, users get access to applications, site management tools and a toll-free 10-digit phone number that serves as the gateway for IVR applications.

In a sense, Angel.com has used traditional Web-development practices to support and create the IVR scripts.

The help system suggests using one of more than a dozen included IVR templates. That allows users to create departments, mailboxes and directories within a half and hour or so. "Small business customers use it because they can look bigger than they are," Zirngibl adds.

The service also auto-generates voice keywords, similar to main menu links, that help callers navigate the voice site.

"Angel can be used with any external voicemail system, as well," says Zirngibl.

Angel.com also provides professional voice services for a nominal fee. The administration console features a dashboard that shows usage activity and account information. If an administrator requires help, a live help chat session can be entered.

Angel combines IVR systems and Web applications, so Web services can be delivered over the phone. "Angel takes text input and then builds a VoiceXML application based on what you typed," Zirngibl says. "You also have access to any Web-accessible data you may have."