Posts Tagged ‘google i/o’

Tropo and Tethr at Google IO 2012

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

Tropo has teamed up with Tethr to demonstrate a great new disaster relief communications platform at Google I/O in San Francisco today.

Tethr lets people get connected to each other and the Internet after a disaster. It’s a unique platform that lets people and organizations work together in difficult circumstances anywhere in the world whether they are online or offline.

Tropo adds voice to the Tethr platform and allows you to take your tropo.com applications on the road with you. When you add Phono with WebRTC into the mix, you get a system that allows calls into applications on Tethr or between users connected to the WiFi.

Today at Google I/O we’re showing Tethr, Tropo and Phono together with another capability. Using OpenBTS from Range Networks we are creating a small GSM mobile phone network inside of Moscone Center. You can make a phone call from Google Chrome to a regular mobile phone without any plugins or even configuration.

We think this has major implications for crisis response. Imagine a neighborhood of folks beset by a natural disaster that has destroyed the infrastructure around them. They plug Tethr into a car battery and are instantly connected to the people around them. They are no longer victims, but in control of their own destiny and are able to self-organize in a 20 mile radius.

For more information on Tethr, visit their website and sign up to be notified when you can get your own Tethr Box. If you’re at Google I/O today, come up to the Chrome Sandbox and play around with our revolutionary new tools.

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Posted in Tropo | 1 Comment »

Skype Journal interviews Tropo at Google I/O

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

At Google I/O last week, Phil Wolff from the Skype Journal interviewed me about Voxeo Labs and Tropo.

In the 5 minute video, I talk about what Tropo is and why it’s a revolutionary platform helping developers build cross channel communications applications.

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Posted in Tropo | No Comments »

Introducing OpenVoice. Your number, Open Source.

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

OpenVoiceLong time Tropo developer Zhao Lu launched OpenVoice today. OpenVoice is a virtual number application that can forward calls, handle voicemail (with transcriptions), send and receive SMS, and make outbound calls from your OpenVoice number. And because OpenVoice is built on Tropo, it has built in support for speech recognition and phone numbers are available from around the world.

OpenVoice is built with Ruby on Rails using the Tropo WebAPI to communicate with the phone system, and Tropo has signed on as a contributor to the project. We’ll be using OpenVoice to show off how to build Sophisticated Tropo applications and using the OpenVoice code and use cases to create tutorials for Tropo features. You can bet in the future that when we add a new feature, we’ll describe how to implement it by using OpenVoice as an example.

We’re launching OpenVoice alongside Zhao today at Google I/O and we’ve packed it with all sorts of Google technologies.

  • Android Client
  • Voicemail notifications and transcriptions delivered over Google Talk
  • Call logs displayed on a google map
  • Import contacts from Gmail
  • Some other hidden goodies

In addition to those, we’ve developed a version of OpenVoice that can run on Google App Engine and uses your Google Account as a single signon platform.

Using Tropo as a platform allowed us to create OpenVoice in under 4 man-weeks. We went from idea to implementation in less than a month. Because of the Tropo underpinnings, developers have a full API they can work with to implement features of their own or interact with their phone for them.

Want to see OpenVoice in action? Stop by and visit Voxeo in the Google I/O Sandbox today and tomorrow. Not at I/O? Chris Matthieu, one of the OpenVoice developers put together a 10 minute video overview. Or download a copy of the code from Github and try it out for yourself.

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Posted in Open Source, Samples | 1 Comment »

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, Samples, SMS, SourceCode | No Comments »

Moving your application beyond the browser

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Voxeo is at Google I/O this week, and one of the products we’re showing off is Tropo. Telephony and SMS seems like a big complicated problem to most people, and they’re amazed when they see how easy and powerful Tropo is.

A decade ago, telephony required all sorts of complex hardware, specialized programming languages, and knowledge of how phone systems worked. Voxeo was founded to make it easy for developers to build applications that run over the phone. The last few years have seen telephony adopt web programming technologies like VoiceXML and web services APIs. We’ve also seen the costs of implementing real time communications come down. Coupled with the rise of hosted and cloud services meaning you don’t need to install or set up VoIP servers, an age of real-time communications is dawning.

More and more consumers are beginning to prefer text over voice. A whole generation is just as likely to communicate over text messaging, IM, and social networking as they are to pick up the phone. If the last decade was about the rise of the telephony developer, the next will be about the demise of voice as SMS, IM, and social media take precedence in consumers minds. To help developers with this transition, Tropo takes the concepts we’ve developed for voice applications and applies them to communications in any form.

Applications developed for voice with Tropo work over SMS, IM, and Twitter, with no additional programming required. Sure, you’ll probably want to tweak the output to be more appropriate for the medium, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Want to see just how easy it is to build a Tropo application? Take a look at our mashup with the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) schedules. Using your phone or IM you can see when the next train is due to arrive at the station of your choice. Call or SMS (407) 374-9954 or send an IM to bartdemo@tropo.im with Google Talk to try it. You can even talk to @tropobart on Twitter. Tropo treats Twitter as an IM network, sending all @mentions to your application just like an instant message would be.

The code behind this is written in Ruby and can sit in our cloud or on the web server of your choice. Other sample applications are available covering everything from simple games to directory assistance, to checking into Foursquare.

Get started building your own application today by creating a Tropo account. Tropo is 100% free for developer usage, so there’s no cost or risk involved in trying it out. You can even take advantage of our world class support, available 24 hours a day.

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Posted in Events | No Comments »