Posts Tagged ‘international’

Call the Empire Strikes Back hotline on Star Wars Day

Friday, May 4th, 2012

Happy Star Wars day! May the 4th be with you.

Poster courtesy Wikipedia

Thirty years ago for the upcoming Empire Strikes Back release, Lucasfilm created a telephone hotline so fans could dial in and hear a short message from a Star Wars character. Each month, fans could dial the hotline and hear a new message, each recorded by the actors from the films. The audio was lost until two years ago, when Lucasfim’s first head of fan relations found an old cassette tape with the recordings on it.

At the time, we created a copy of the telephone hotline, and since we’re big Star Wars fans around here (I have a lifesize Yoda and dozens of vintage posters in my office), we’ve updated it for Star Wars day, complete with a vanity phone number.

Call (630) 92-FORCE ((630) 923-6723) to hear one of the original messages from the Empire Strikes Back hotline. Want to hear more? You don’t need to wait a month for the next one. Just call back. Each time you call, we’ll play a randomly-selected recording. There are five in all.

Outside the US? Call in via SIP at 9991443239@sip.tropo.com or Skype at +990009369991443239. Or call one of the 36 local access numbers listed below.

(more…)

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Customer Spotlight: PalmLing

Monday, January 30th, 2012

We are excited to feature PalmLing on this week’s Tropo Customer Spotlight! Today I sat down with Ryan Frankel, one of the co-founders of PalmLing, to discuss their new business and learn more about how they are using Tropo and Phono for their human translation services.

What is PalmLing?

PalmLing is human translation in the palm of your hand. PalmLing is a phone-based platform that enables travelers to use their cell phones to speak with exceptional translators. Translators are available 24/7 and can speak directly to the person with whom you are communicating, or they can provide the information you need to communicate in a foreign language.

PalmLing uses Tropo’s Voice APIs and platform to answer international calls and initiate conferences between callers and translators to provide their service. PalmLing also uses Phono, Tropo’s web phone, to demo their translation service directly from their website. Phono basically initiates a call from the web browser into their Tropo voice application just as if someone dialed their phone number.

To learn more about PalmLing, visit their website at http://palmling.com!

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Tropo Speaks your Language – 24 in all

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Tropo’s international support is one of the features people love best about us. Numbers in 41 countries, SMS delivery worldwide, and text to speech and speech recognition in 9 languages.

Wait, only nine languages? Surely we can do better.

Tropo can now speak and understand 17 new languages (for a total of 24) with speech recognition and text to speech in both male and female voices in Catalan, Danish, Finnish, Canadian French, Galacian (female only), Greek, Mandarin Chinese (female text to speech only), Norwegian (no speech recognition), Russian, Argentine Spanish (male only), Chilean Spanish, (female only), Portuguese, Brazilan Portuguese, Swedish, and Valencian.

We’ve added 14 new voices to existing languages. US English, UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Mexican Spanish all get new voices for you to play with.

These languages are available immediately in both our free developer accounts and production applications.

The Tropo documentation will always have a list of the current languages, voices, and recognition engines and is the best place to go for up-to-date information, but for convenience, here’s a list of all the languages and voices that are supported today.

Language Recognizer Female voice Male Voice
English (US) en-us (default) Allison (default), Susan, Vanessa Dave, Steven, Victor
English (UK) en-gb Elizabeth, Kate Simon
Catalan ca-es Montserrat Jordi
Danish da-dk Frida Magnus
Dutch nl-nl Saskia Willem
Finnish fi-fi Milla Mikko
French fr-fr Florence, Juliette Bernard
French (Canadian) fr-ca Charlotte Olivier
Galacian gl-es Carmela
German de-de Katrin Stefan
Greek el-gr Afroditi Nikos
Italian it-it Giulia, Paola, Silvana, Valentina Luca, Marcello, Matteo, Roberto
Mandarin Chinese Linlin, Lisheng
Norwegian Vilde Henrik
Polish pl-pl Zosia Krzysztof
Russian ru-ru Olga Dmitri
Spanish (Castilian) es-es Carmen, Leonor Jorge, Juan
Spanish (Argentine) es-ar Diego
Spanish (Chilean) es-cl Francisca
Spanish (Mexican) es-mx Soledad, Ximena, Esperanza Carlos
Portuguese pt-pt Amalia Eusebio
Portuguese (Brazilian) pt-br Fernanda, Gabriela Felipe
Swedish sv-se Annika Sven
Valencian x-va Empar

One thing to note is that if you use PHP, it does not handle unicode very well. This can lead to problems when using some voices in PHP in our scripting API, and is especially problematic when using multibyte languages like Chinese. We’re working with Quercus, our PHP engine, to try and improve the unicode support.

Tropo is only two and a half years old and can speak twenty-four languages. That’s one precocious toddler.

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Babelverse: Using the phone for real-time Japanese translation for crisis workers

Friday, March 18th, 2011

When web developers Mayel de Borniol and Josef Dunne saw the catastrophe in Japan, they new how they could help. They’d spend the last few months creating Babelverse (@babelverse on Twitter), a live human translation service. And even though the company wasn’t quite ready to launch, they spent the whole night pushing to get the product out the door.

The result is an application that connects volunteer Japanese interpreters with aid teams, support groups, and the media. Interpreters can register to help and when someone needs translation services, they can simply call a local phone number in Japan, the US, UK, Australia, or Switzerland to be connected to a live translator. People can also call in with Skype, or from right inside their browser, thanks to their integration with Phono. While Babelverse’s ultimate goal is to create a real-time translation marketplace, they’re offering their service for free during the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Babelverse uses Tropo for all their voice services, so we asked Josef and Mayel to tell us a little more about the project.

Where’d the idea for Babelverse come from?

Josef and Mayel both moved from their native countries (The UK and France) to Greece, they only spoke a little Greek, and had come up against a language barrier, they needed a solution, that’s how the idea of Babelverse was born, machine translation is not ideal, sometimes you need quick access to a human interpreter, Babelverse aims to provide this.

Can you tell us how Babelverse is going?

In its first 48 hours of operation, more than 100 bilingual people have volunteered their time (4 hours each on average, totalling more than 16 days of online time).

What led you to choose Tropo?

After trying several platforms both self and cloud hosted, Tropo seemed to offer the right balance of features and extensibility.

What’s been the best part of working with Tropo so far?

A nice surprise, is that Tropo provided a local number in Japan, and that Tropo right away offered to waive all costs to aid with the operation in Japan.

How long has Babelverse taken to create so far?

We’ve been developing Babelverse, a human interpretation service for a few months, but in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Babelverse has set up (during a 12 hour all night coding marathon) a dedicated and completely free service, meant to break down language barriers between aid teams, NGOs, media and locals.

What are your future plans for Babelverse?

Reach millions of users all over the world, making on-demand interpretation in any language easily accessible, available to everyone, anytime, everywhere, and on any device.

How can people help? Especially people who don’t speak Japanese?

Everyone can do their bit, by spreading the word, (some of their friends, or friends of friends, surely speak Japanese). People that speak multiple languages sign up at babelverse.com as they may be able to help out in other situations.

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Simple tips for better text to speech

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Are you looking for a way for your text to speech to sound more natural? Here’s a couple of quick tips.

First, make sure you’re using the right voice. Trying to pronounce Spanish words with an English or German text to speech voice will give poor results. The text to speech engine will phonetically say words it doesn’t know, leading to some odd-sounding vocalizations if you use the wrong language’s voice. See the voice parameter on the say() function for details on how to set the right language. You can also set the voice on ask() and record().

For English speakers, try using a different accent. Tropo provides both US and UK accents. Users in the US find that the British accented voices sound more natural. UK users tend to like the US voices better. Hearing a different accent helps mask the robotic sound of the automated voices.

Play around with our different voices for your application and see what sounds best to you.

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Free Tropo Development Goes International

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Since Tropo launched last spring developers have enjoyed completely free accounts for development and testing.

While some companies provide you with a few measly dollars in credit for your testing, or make you start paying after a month, ready or not, Tropo feels that you shouldn’t have to pay for development and that the best person to decide if you’re ready for production is you.

Our commitment to free development has always included US phone numbers and no-cost phone calls to any number in the United States. Today we’re expanding that support to the international community.

Starting now, local phone numbers are available for free in 41 countries around the world. Just pick your location and we’ll assign you an available number in your home country. This makes testing Tropo applications easier than ever — it’s just a local call.

Need to test an app that makes calls? Those have been 100% free in development for calls to US numbers. We’re expanding that support internationally as well. In addition to the free calls to US mobiles and landlines that you’ve always had, our developer program now supports free calling to landlines in 17 other countries.

Tropo’s goal is to make it easy for developers to create, test and deploy voice, SMS, and instant messaging applications no matter where you live. Now you can build a truly global communications application. And until you move to production, it won’t cost you a dime.

What about SMS? For now, SMS is only available on US numbers. You can certainly send and receive worldwide, but you’ll have to use a Tropo number from the US to do it.

Here’s the countries where Tropo is offering free phone numbers to developers: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US

Make outbound phone calls to landlines for free in Belgium, Canada (mobiles, too), Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US (mobiles, too).

And remember, Tropo supports speech recognition and text to speech in lots of languages: Dutch, English (both UK and US varieties), French (French and Canadian), German, Italian, Spanish (Castilian or Mexican), and Polish.

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Tropo’s in Poland, so we’re speaking Polish

Friday, May 28th, 2010

This weekend, Jason Goecke is at Euruko, Europe’s Ruby conference talking about Tropo. Since Euruko is held in Krakow, Poland we’ve added a little something for the locals.

result = ask '1 teraz proszę powiedzieć', {:voice =>"zosia",
                                           :choices => "jeden",
                                           :recognizer => "pl-pl"}

That’s right, Tropo’s speech recognition and text to speech both now include Polish.

Polish speech recognition can be triggered by setting your recognizer to “pl-pl” on ask() or conference(). And for text to speech you have your choice of voices: “zosia” for female or “krzysztof” for male.

We added it for a Ruby conference, but it’s available in every programming language.

Here’s PHP:

<?php
$result = ask('1 teraz proszę powiedzieć', array(
                                           'voice' =>"krzysztof",
                                           'choices' => "jeden",
                                           'recognizer' => "pl-pl"
                                        ));
?>

Oh, for those that don’t speak Polish, the examples say “Say one now” and then have “one” as the choice.

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International Male (Voices)

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Since going international a few weeks ago, we’ve had some requests for more text to speech (TTS) voices. In our launch, we provided eight female voices in various languages and dialects. A number of customers have inquired about male voices for those same dialects.

They’re available starting now. Just like the female voices, each male voice is identified by a character’s name. The new voices we’ve added are:

  • jorge – Castilian Spanish – Male
  • bernard – French – Male
  • dave – US English – Male
  • simon – British English – Male
  • stefan – German – Male
  • luca – Italian – Male
  • willem – Dutch – Male
  • carlos – Mexican Spanish – Male

To use one of the new voices, just add the character’s name to your text to speech command in Tropo. For example, in PHP, you can do…

<?php
answer();
say('Comment allez-vous?', array('voice' => 'bernard'));
say('ça va bien merci.', array('voice' => 'florence'));
?>

Or in Ruby, try:

answer
say "1 2 3 4 5 my name is Dave and I'm from the U S.", :voice => 'dave'
say "Hello, Dave. I'm Simon from London.", :voice => 'simon'

Want to use one of these languages in speech recognition? Our Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) platform recognizes all of the languages we can speak, regardless if if they’re said by a man or woman.

In JavaScript:

answer();
result=ask("Quel âge avez-vous?", {
  choices:"[1-3 digits]",
  recognizer:"fr-fr",
  voice:"bernard"
  } );
if (result.name=='choice') {
  say("C'est bon. Je suis " + result.value + " ans.", {voice:"bernard"})
}

The full list of voices and documentation of how to use various TTS voices is available under the say() function.

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Deutsch? French? Spanish? How To Use International Text-To-Speech (TTS) in Tropo Apps

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Last week we announced that Tropo now included for free the ability to support Text-To-Speech in 8 languages. In this post, I want to show you how you can easily implement this in your Tropo app. First, though, if you want to hear the different voices, you can call these numbers now and try it out:

+1 (407) 374-9911
Skype: +990009369991430013
SIP: sip:9991430013@sip.tropo.com
iNum: +883510001805741

Here is what the JavaScript code looks like for that application (thanks to Voxeon Ron Blaisdell):

answer();
wait('500');

say("Hello world! This is a demonstration of the various voices & languages on Tropo.");

//English Female - Allison - en-us
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Allison", { voice: 'allison' });

//Spanish Castillian Female - Carmen - es-es
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Carmen", { voice: 'carmen' });

//French Female - Florence - fr-fr
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Florence", { voice: 'florence' });

//English UK - Kate - en-uk
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Kate", { voice: 'kate' });

//German Female - Katrin - de-de
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Katrin", { voice: 'katrin' });

//Italian Female - Paola - it-it
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Paola", { voice: 'paola' });

//Dutch Female - Saskia - nl-nl
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Saskia", { voice: 'saskia' });

//American Spanish Female - Soledad - es-mx
say("1 2 3 4 5 this is Soledad", { voice: 'soledad' });

say("ta da");

hangup();

That’s literally all you need to do… add the { voice:'name' } parameter to the say function and there you go!

Now for those of you who don’t use JavaScript, the syntax is similar for the other languages.

Ruby:

say "J'aime les écureuils!", :voice => 'florence'
say "1 2 3 4 5 this in Florence", :voice => 'florence'

Python:

say ("Guten Tag!", {'voice':'katrin'})
say ("1 2 3 4 5 this is Katrin", {'voice':'katrin'})

Groovy:

say( "Hola, como estas?", [ 'voice':"carmen" ])
say( "1 2 3 4 5 this is Carmen", [ 'voice':"carmen" ])

PHP:

<?php say ("J'aime les écureuils!", array('voice'=>'florence')); ?>
<?php say ("1 2 3 4 5, this is Florence", array('voice'=>'florence')); ?>

That’s it! Simple and easy…

Today we support these languages and currently only female voices, but you can expect to see us releasing support for even more languages as well as male voices in the weeks and months ahead. And if you have a project that needs a specific voice, please do email our support team and let them know what you need.

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Tropo Adds Twitter and goes International

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

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:
  • 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:
  • 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:
  • 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:
  • 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.

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