Archive for the ‘SMS’ Category

Tropo is Easy!

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Tropo Tinkerstorm

Amber and Aaron are on the bottom left of this photo.

There is no doubt that this weekend’s 24-hour Open Government Tinkerstorm was a huge success!  A conference room full of passionate open government developers came together along with city leaders like Bill Schrier, Seattle’s CTO, and Robin Friedman, former Seattle Emergency and Disaster Management Director.  Tropo, Socrata, and Amazon AWS sponsored the event and remained on hand to help and guide the event participants to success.  In the end, all of the entries developed and deployed are available as open source and were produced for the benefit of the citizens of Seattle.

Reflecting on the event, I wanted to share an interesting observation that I had during the course of the contest.  The winners of the iPad, Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, were not originally in the contest.  They were hanging out with us at the event working on their totally awesome side project called GeoLoqi.  Halfway through the event, Aaron looks in my direction and says that he is interested in integrating Tropo SMS with GeoLoqi.  Several minutes later his iPhone buzzes with an SMS and he looks at me and Amber and says, “It worked!  GeoLoqi just me an SMS notification triggered by my location!”  This was certainly very exciting for all of us but it the event gets more interesting…

Amber and Aaron left to get some sleep and came back in the morning for breakfast with an idea to enter the contest.  Their idea was ChatterCast, a mashup of Tropo, Socrata’s data.seattle.gov, Instamapper, and GeoLoqi services.  Basically ChatterCast subscribes your phone to real-time 911 call data provided by http://data.seattle.gov.  ChatterCast alerts you based on your location of 911 events happening around you.

This is a great example of how someone with an idea can not only win a contest only after getting started in the final hours but how anyone with an idea can change the world.  Tropo’s ease of use makes it super easy to communicate with telephones via voice and SMS or even IM and Twitter with a couple of lines a code.  There’s no reason not to add telephone support to your existing web applications to make them even more powerful in this mobile and social age we live in today.  So what are you waiting on?  Sign-up for Tropo today and change the world!

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Posted in Events, Open Source, SMS, Tropo, mashups | 2 Comments »

What is Multi-modal?

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

We’ve talked a bit about how text communications are on the rise, replacing a lot of the voice self service that companies have traditionally offered. Text doesn’t always replace voice, however. With platforms that can work over both voice and text, it’s possible for text to augment the voice channel.

Take the example of directory assistance. Back when I was a kid, you called directory assistance, gave a business name (to a real human!) and they gave you the phone number. You wrote down the number and gave the business a call. Over time, companies started offering a service where they’d transfer you to the number, letting you skip writing it down and dialing yourself. With mobile phones, this service became even more important, as you’re often calling for assistance when you can’t stop and write something down.

An issue sometimes arises, however, when the number is busy. Or you get disconnected and have to call back. Since you didn’t pick up the number from the directory assistance but were transferred by them, you end up having to call back, ask for the business again, and get transferred again.

Multi-modal to the rescue.

Imagine if your phone company didn’t just transfer you to the number, but also sent you a text message with the business name, number, and address. That’s a multimodal conversation. You start out communicating in one channel (voice) and end up finishing the conversation or getting supplementary information via another (text).

As an example of multimodal applications, I’ve updated our Tropo Local Search demo. If you call from a mobile phone and look up a restaurant, you’ll get a text message containing the contact information of the listing you selected. Give it a try by calling (415) 894-9965 and finding coffee, pizza, or some other type of food in your neighborhood. And of course, the code is available in our documentation or on Github.

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Posted in IM, Multi-channel, SMS, Samples, SourceCode | No Comments »

New SMS Features Deployed

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

As we work to continue to extend the Tropo API, we have added a few new SMS features for your enjoyment. The new features:

  • Caller ID may be set for outbound SMS to any phone number assigned to the application sending the SMS.
  • If Caller ID is not set, then by default the first phone number in your application list of numbers will be used as the Caller ID.
  • Tropo will now respond from the same phone number that was initially contacted by an Inbound SMS by default if there is more than one number assigned to your application.

Here is a quick snippet on how to send an outbound SMS using Tropo Scripting and setting the Caller ID:

call $numberToMessage, { :channel  => 'TEXT', :network  => 'SMS', :callerID => '4155551212' }
say 'Here is your friendly SMS message'
hangup

More to come, so stay tuned!

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Posted in Ruby, SMS, Tropo | No Comments »

Messaging with Tropo

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

After our announcement for support of SMS and Instant Messaging at SpeechTek this week, I would like to build upon Mike Thompson’s post for building Messaging into your Tropo applications. To get started all you need is the same Tropo account you are already using.

When you log in to your account now, you will notice three additional features:

1. An option to add a URL that powers SMS/messaging

TropoMessagingURL

2. An option to add an SMS enabled number (provided we have them in stock)

TropoMessagingSMS

3. An option to add one or more Instant Messaging Networks to your application

TropoMessagingIMNets

Once you have created a new application, now you need to write a script. The beauty is that you use the same methods and capabilities of the existing Tropo API. In this Ruby example (available on Gist) we are going to play a sandwich trivia game, where we ask the user to tell us what WE think are the best sandwiches ever:

TropoMessagingScript

When you then chat with the Instant Messaging or SMS account you have configured in your application, you will see something like this:

TropoMessagingExample

Thats it! You have added messaging to your Tropo account.

A current consideration is that when dealing with different channels your timeouts need to be adjusted. On a voice call you may not want to wait for a response any more than 10 seconds, while with messaging you may want to wait 30 seconds or 60 seconds or more. This is why we have two URLs, one for voice and one for SMS/messaging right now, to allow you to account for user behavior across different channels.

Stay tuned as we add additional features to Tropo, and enjoy!

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Posted in Ruby, SMS, applications | No Comments »

Add SMS and IM to any existing Tropo application in Ruby, python, PHP, JavaScript or Groovy… today!

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

As part of our Prophecy 10 announcement today, you can now immediately start to add SMS and instant messaging to your existing (or new) Tropo applications. When you login to Tropo and look at the settings for one of your applications, you will see that you now have new settings:

troposmsim.jpg

All you need to do is follow the links and instructions and… ta da… you now have a single “communications app” that is communicating with users through voice, SMS, and IM. (And yes, you could of course create a “SMS-only” or “IM-only” app that purely interacts with users via those mediums.)

Please do check it out… try it out (perhaps with the sample apps available at docs.tropo.com)… and let us know what you think. And if you come up with a great sample app using the IM or SMS side of things, we’d love to hear about it and potentially point it out to others.

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Posted in IM, SMS, Tropo | 4 Comments »