One of the things that makes Tropo truly amazing is it’s support for speech recognition.

Speech recognition is becoming increasingly important in our everyday lives. Smartphones and powerful handheld devices enable multimodality, and there are more and more restrictions placed on our use of phones while doing other things (like driving).

If you want to build cloud-based mobile applications, you’ve got to have speech recognition. Why would anyone use a platform that tied a developer to nothing but DTMF input (touch tone entry using a key pad) – a technology that was initially rolled out to the public when John F. Kennedy was still in the White House.

The screencast below demonstrates how to use Tropo to build a speech recognition application that can capture a caller’s address. All of the code used in this demo can be obtained on GitHub.

If you are building a mobile application and would like to use speech recognition, Tropo provides some nice choices.

If the input you want to collect is relatively simple, you can use one of the prebuilt simple Tropo grammars. In addition, as discussed in the screencast above, you can use industry standard SRGS grammars as well. Tropo also supports advanced grammar features like semantic interpretation.

While this post focused on using speech recognition to collect an address, you can use it for almost anything your application requires. With Tropo, the sky is the limit.

Which I guess is the point of cloud telephony…