Long 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.
