Tropo is all about making it easy for you to interact with your customers. What if you could write one application and communicate with your customers via voice, instant messaging (IM), text message (SMS) and even Twitter? And what if they could call that application from anywhere in the world and talk with it in their own language?

Welcome to the new Tropo.com release today!

Tropo was already the easiest way to build voice-powered phone applications. Today, the Tropo cloud communications platform goes into full production launch with a suite of new features including:

• TWITTER SUPPORT – You can now assign a Twitter name to your application and customers can interact with the app by simply sending a Twitter message to that name. Your app will see all messages to the Twitter account and can take action on messages that are received. Want to set up an app to do customer support over Twitter? Want to make your web application be able to service Twitter users? Now you can. Simple and easy and all secured by OAuth, too. Read more:
  • How to Add Twitter Support to a Tropo.com App – Step by Step
  • An Example of How to Make a Tropo App Respond Differently to Different Channels (including Twitter)
  • Testing a Tropo app with Twitter? Remember that Twitter rejects duplicate tweets…
• INTERNATIONAL PHONE NUMBERS – No longer are Tropo phone numbers limited to North America. Now for a low monthly fee you can get numbers in over 30 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
• INTERNATIONAL OUTBOUND DIALING – Naturally if you can accept inbound calls from other countries you can also make outbound calls to virtually any country around the world. Making international calls? Ask us for our international rates.
• INTERNATIONAL TEXT-TO-SPEECH – All those fancy new international numbers deserves some fancy new language support, too. A simple flag in your code lets you change the voice used for text-to-speech to any of these languages: US English, UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Mexican Spanish or Castilian Spanish. Read more:
  • How To Use International Text-To-Speech (TTS) in Tropo Apps
  • Teaching Your Application to Really Talk
• INTERNATIONAL SPEECH RECOGNITION – Tropo.com has always supported automatic speech recognition (ASR) in English so that you can have your callers talk back to your app instead of having to punch their touchtone responses in… now we’ve added ASR support for more languages: UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Mexican Spanish or Castilian Spanish.
• SMS SUPPORT – Does your app have a US number? The exact same phone number you use to call your app can also be used to receive and reply to SMS messages. Want to broadcast an announcement or send a user some alerts? Your app can send SMS messages, too. Connect the millions of mobile users to your application now. It’s the same API as your voice application, so you don’t need to write two different apps. Read more:
  • How-To: Sending an outbound SMS from Tropo
• IM and CHAT SUPPORT – You can add instant messaging accounts to your app and communicate via AOL’s AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, Microsoft’s Live Messenger, GoogleTalk or any XMPP or Jabber IM service. We’ll even give you a nifty “tropo.im” Jabber ID for your app. Like SMS, IM uses the same API as your voice apps. No extra coding required.
• TOLL-FREE PHONE NUMBERS – Want to make your app accessible to everyone in North America at no cost to them? Add a toll-free number. And because you shouldn’t have to pay extra just to provide your customers with more convenience, calls to toll free numbers are priced the same as local numbers.
• NEW REST/JSON WEB API – Beyond the hosted scripting Tropo has always offered, you can now host your application on your own web server, write it in whatever language you choose and communicate through our RESTful web API using JSON. Read more:
  • Tropo Web API Guide
  • New Tropo Web API, Conferencing and more
  • Twitter mashups with Tropo (using the Web API)
• ONE-CLICK MOVE TO PRODUCTION – After you have developed your app and want it to go live, it’s just one click in the web interface to move it into production. No contracts, no calls into a salesperson. Simply go into the web management interface and flip the switch. That’s it.

Beyond the new features, Tropo continues to offer the following:

• FREE DEVELOPER ACCOUNTS – No need to provide a credit card. No need to purchase credits just to try out your apps. We let you sign up completely for free… get free North American phone numbers, free outbound calling, free support… Just head over to Tropo.com to sign up now.
• SKYPE, SIP and INUM NUMBERS – We know that the world of voice calling is moving beyond the legacy Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). When you create an app on Tropo, you immediately get (at no extra charge) a Skype number, a SIP address and an iNum number to let people call your app from all those newer networks, too.
• FREE DEVELOPER SUPPORT – We don’t call our support team the “Customer Obsession Team” for nothing… they are obsessed with making sure you get the information you need to make your apps successful and they’re doing it around the clock.
• TROPO SCRIPTING – If you don’t want to host your application on your own web server you can easily host it on our cloud in Ruby, JavaScript, Python, PHP or Groovy.
• VOXEO’S REAL-TIME CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE – Tropo.com runs on top of Voxeo’s worldwide cloud infrastructure that is optimized for real-time communications and will ensure your calls and messages go through.

We’re very excited that Tropo has gone live and we’re looking forward to seeing what you all do with it. Why not start now? Head over to Tropo.com and create an account. Or, if you are an existing user, login and check out all the new features you can add to all your existing applications.

Related posts:

1. Free Tropo Development Goes International
2. Deutsch? French? Spanish? How To Use International Text-To-Speech (TTS) in Tropo Apps
3. Testing a Tropo app with Twitter? Remember that Twitter rejects duplicate tweets…
4. Get Notified When Someone Mentions You on Twitter
5. International Male (Voices)

Tags: announcement, API, IM, international, release, SMS, Twitter

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