Under this initiative, Voxeo will sponsor development of new open source telephony applications, distribute select applications with its VoIP and IVR offerings, and increase overall awareness of the benefits of open source telephony applications to its customers, partners, and the over 21,000 registered members of its Evolution developer program.

"We believe there’s a huge opportunity to leverage the power of open source at the telephony application layer," said RJ Auburn, CTO of Voxeo. "We hope to start a chain reaction of new contributions and projects that will spark innovation and lower the cost of voice application development."

To kick off RocketSource, three new open source applications developed by Voxeo partners will be posted to Sourceforge.net -- the world’s largest open source development site -- and distributed with downloads of Voxeo’s Prophecy Voice Platform.

The three initial RocketSource applications include:

- Vox-Attendant: a VoiceXML-based, speech-driven auto attendant that can connect callers with any person or group with an enterprise, via their desk, cellular, or VoIP phones.

- Vox-Mail: a VoiceXML-based, speech-driven voicemail application that can store messages locally or integrate with any IMAP email server to provide basic unified messaging.

- Voice Conference Manager: A VoiceXML and CCXML-based, speech-driven conference manager that features both phone and web-based conference call creation, access, and management.

"These aren’t just reusable application components. These are complete, working applications that can be deployed immediately. At the same time, enterprise customers will have the freedom to extend and customize as they see fit without the time and cost associated with custom-developed applications," said John Hibel, Vice President of Marketing at Voxeo.

"Until now, the open source community developed voice applications in isolation from each other," said Moshe Yudkowsky, President of Disaggregate and lead developer of Voice Conference Manager. "With RocketSource a new community will emerge, and we will start to create applications that use common user interfaces, common themes, common databases, and common modules. If we succeed, the result will be revolutionary -- an avalanche of open source applications that provide a wide range of functionality and become part of everyone’s basic tools, just like email."

RocketSource is the latest initiative in Voxeo’s longstanding commitment to foster VoIP and IVR application development. Voxeo has offered Evolution -- its free hosted VoIP and IVR developer program for nearly seven years. In early 2006 Voxeo also introduced a free version of its premise-based Prophecy Voice Platform -- the world’s first feature-rich, easy, VoIP and IVR platform with built-in speech recognition and synthesis engines. Unlike other extremely large and complex speech platforms, Prophecy can be downloaded and installed in less than two minutes. Going forward, Voxeo will soon announce other initiatives to sponsor and promote partner offerings to Prophecy and Evolution users.