Greetings from Vodia. I hope this finds everyone looking forward to a wonderful holiday season. 

I’m happy to announce that 2024 is full of exciting news for Vodia. Our biggest announcement, which we made in November, is that our PBX is now certified for Microsoft Teams. While this is an outstanding technical achievement for our company, it will also significantly impact our roadmap. 

We are convinced Microsoft will continue pushing Teams as the office phone system, and we will continue to focus on areas where it’s difficult to use Teams as a standalone communications platform, and on the SIP interoperability we’ve built into our PBX that opens up these areas. As we all know, telephony and VoIP are sprawling, complex landscapes, and even giants like Microsoft can’t cover all of the terrain, something I recently discussed with Doug Green, the publisher of Technology Reseller News, on his podcast. We believe this is a great opportunity for our partners, especially when it comes to a number of specific industry verticals. 

The other topic that dominated 2024 at Vodia is the integration of Realtime AI through various API. 

The OpenAI API integration was really just a humble start for us: right now it’s expensive, the Vodia interface makes it hard to use and its functionality is limited. We expect, however, that prices will come down, we’ll make it easier to use and a better marketplace understanding of how to use this technology will open up further and quite exciting opportunities - we’ll go from low-hanging fruit to the better fruit currently hanging further up the tree! The blind transfer was a start, to which we will add attended transfer and other methods, including mute and recording. The integration framework that communicates with various CRM systems might actually become very useful, particularly, for example, when we can feed more context about the caller into the API and perform customer changes “back into” the CRM.  

We also did a lot of internal cleanup in 2024 within the PBX. Version 68 was and remains a mature version, and it was difficult to exceed this maturity with Version 69, but we are starting to see returns on our housekeeping, and we are seeing more and more 69 systems in production - with tremendous results. In 2025 we will release a new administration front end: this new front end will retire the outdated Bootstrap and deploy the newer Tailwind framework. We have already begun inviting our partners to test drive Version 70 and make sure it will be a smooth transition from V69, V68, or from whatever version you’re currently using. 

On the app front, we went native on Android. This was an important step for us to ensure the Vodia phone system stays up to date with the evolving Android telephone interface and offers a responsive user interface, in terms of speed; we also made some improvements to our Windows app. In 2025 we will look into a more fundamental overhaul of the iOS app and possibly better align the iOS vs. Android experience. 

Finally, I’ll spare you all the talk about how much AI will change the world. It will, though, and it will also fundamentally affect telephony. I believe Vodia is well-positioned to bring various AI APIs into the VoIP world, beyond the playground level, into actual, productive, everyday use. It’s going to be a thrilling ride. Watch this space…

I wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season and a happy, healthy and prosperous 2025. 

Sincerely yours, 
‍Christian Stredicke