Developing applications for telephony and communication is very difficult. There are old, proprietary systems to integrate with, standards are rare, and when there are standards, they are implemented differently and can't be integrated out of the box. Telephone networks are also closed and restricted by NDAs. Compared to web development, telephony development is a hassle.

RJ Auburn of Voxeo describes how his company's telephony development stack is the infrastructure that will unlock the creativity of application developers. Using voice XML and CC-XML, developers can interact with telephone services similar to using a web service. This spares them from having to know the gory details of the telephone network. He compares it to the difference between writing standard web pages and having to write an Apache plug-in for each site.

He concludes by showing a sample application that will make a phone call each time a tweet is received from Twitter. This only takes a couple minutes when using the developer tools from Voxeo.