Tim Strimple joined us at the LA Holiday Hackathon to get in on the competition of building Tropo applications for prizes and won a $50 Tropo Production credit for his Tropo SMS and Wolfram Alpha mashup!
You can ask the application virtually any question via SMS using the following phone number 661-206-2681 and it responds to your inquiry via SMS using Wolfram Alpha’s search results. Here’s a video of Tim demonstrating his application in action!
Here’s the code behind Tim’s Tropo SMS Wolfram Alpha mashup! It’s written in PHP and uses the Tropo Scripting API.
<?php
function CheckForShortcut($request)
{
if(stripos($request, "siri") !== false)
{
return "I don't like to talk about her.";
}
if(stripos($request, "remind") !== false)
{
return "I am not your personal assistant.";
}
if(stripos($request, "tropo") !== false)
{
return "Tropo is great, I love it!";
}
return false;
}
function ParseResponse($response)
{
// Replace with real XML parsing
$min = strpos($response, "</plaintext>");
$startPos = strpos($response, "<plaintext>", $min) + 11;
$endPos = strpos($response, "</plaintext>", $startPos);
$length = $endPos - $startPos;
if($min > 0)
{
return substr($response, $startPos, $length);
}
else
{
return "Go ask Siri...";
}
}
function GetResults($request)
{
$shortcut = CheckForShortcut($request);
if($shortcut)
{
return $shortcut;
}
$request = str_replace (" ", "%20",$request);
$wolframApiKey = "XXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX";
$url = "http://api.wolframalpha.com/v2/query?appid=" . $wolframApiKey . "&input=" . $request;
$response = file_get_contents($url);
return ParseResponse($response);
}
if($currentCall->channel == "TEXT")
{
$result = GetResults($currentCall->initialText);
say($result);
}
else
{
say("I do not support voice currently. Try sending me a text message instead.");
}
?>
Approximately 30 Los Angeles .NET, Ruby, PHP, and Javascript developers attended this Saturday’s LA Holiday Hackathon at Outlook Amusements sponsored by RightNow Technologies and Tropo. The theme of the event consisted of building a Voice, SMS, or Instant Messaging holiday application based on the Tropo Scripting or Web API. Here is a photo of everyone hard at work hacking on their holiday Tropo application.
I love the sound of phones ringing in the morning! By noon, the applications were starting to take shape with some definite front runners in the competition. In addition to Tropo APIs, many of the teams also used Phono, SMSified, RightNow, Wolfram Alpha, and Google’s Shopping APIs to deliver their new applications.
Here are the winners of the LA Holiday Hackathon listed in order:
First place goes to Gift Finder winning an iPad2 compliments of RightNow Technologies. This application allows the user to enter a phone number, name, and email address to place an outbound call to someone to recommend gifts for loved ones. Speech recognition was used to ask the user for their zip code, gender, price range range, and category of the gift. The application uses the Google Shopping API to find gifts in their area for the gender and age of the recipient and reads them off one by one using text to speech. This application was built using Ruby and Sinatra and hosted on Heroku as well as using the Javascript Tropo Scripting API.
Second place goes to Santa’s Book winning a Kindle Fire compliments of RightNow Technologies. This application asks for two phone numbers and starts by calling the first number to ask a series of five questions using speech recognition to determine if the person is naughty or nice along with asking them to record the present that they would like to receive. The application proceeds to call the second number to relay the naughty/nice determination and playback their gift recording. The application also sends an SMS text message to the second number with the naughty/nice determination along with the transcribed gift request. This application also used RightNow’s CRM API to log the call and data related to the surveys. This application was built using PHP and the Tropo WebAPI along with RightNow’s CRM API.
Third place goes to Santa Hack winning a $75 Fry’s Electronics gift card compliments of Outlook Amusements. This application used Phono and Tropo to schedule and bridge appointments to speak with Santa. This application was built using C# and the Tropo WebAPI.
Fourth place goes to Tropo WA (Wolfram Alpha) winning a $50 Tropo production credit. This application was a Wolfram Alpha and Tropo SMS mashup written in PHP using the Tropo Scripting API. You can ask the application various questions via SMS on the following number 661-206-2681.
Ushahidi is a platform for crowdsourcing information. Members of the public submit reports that are geo-located and then put on a map. The platform is used in disaster relief, election monitoring and just about any other situation where people need to learn things from one another quickly and concisely. Out of the box, Ushahidi allows people to submit reports via the web, mobile applications, Twitter, Facebook with support for a few SMS APIs as well.
We have created an easy-to-use application that lets people use Tropo to input data into Ushahidi via SMS. We’ve put the code up on Github and you’re welcome to submit pull requests if you find bugs or add features.
To use the code, you don’t have to install anything on Ushahidi. Here are the steps:
In Ushahidi, create a user with “Admin” privileges.
check out the code from Github
edit the configuration lines at the top with your Ushahidi credentials and URL
create a new Scripting API Application on Tropo.com.
Once your Tropo app is created, you can add an SMS-enabled number (US and Canada currently) and optionally configure it to talk on any IM networks or Twitter.
Now, when you send a message to any of your configured numbers the application will attempt to geo-locate the message based on its contents. The app then submits a report via the Ushahidi API in an unverified state. Admins of the site can then verify the reports and publish them to the web.
In our example here, we simulated a flood in Milwaukee. The instance pulls in feeds from local media and disaster response community, accepts reports via the web and accepts reports from a Tropo app I created. We sent a message to the number configured in the app with the following content:
Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital Milwaukee WI is flooded. Power is out.
This was submitted to Ushahidi in an unverified state. The reviewer then added text to flush out the report based on other incoming data and then published the report:
This sort of crowdsourced data, gathered at the source, is valuable for many reasons. It gets the word to responders and the public more quickly so that people can act appropriately (e.g. by not going to that hospital, go to another one.) First responders become aware of the weight of a problem when more people report the same thing or when the first report comes in of a very big event.
Watervoices.ca, developed this past weekend at RHoK, will be going live with this application soon and we hope to see others using it to help the world soon. Over time, we will be adding support for Voice, PhoneGap within Ushahidi and many other features.
This is a guest blog post by Jonathan Baldwin showcasing an application that he wrote using Tropo called The People’s Skype. It’s phone-powered, distributed voice and voting system for the #Occupy Movement!
As the Occupy Wall Street movement grew in popularity at Zucotti Park in NYC, and other occupations in North America, Jonathan noticed a problem with the primary method occupiers used to communicate in large groups. The People’s Mic, a method of augmenting a speaker’s voice by having listeners repeat their words, didn’t scale up when huge numbers of people attended rallies and General Assemblies. In these cases, the audience had to repeat the speaker’s words multiple times before it reached the far edges of the crowd – it became gradually harder to understand the original speaker’s words the further you are from the inner circle.
Motivated by this, Jonathan was determined to find a simple solution that anyone had access to. There were similar talks amongst the OWS Tech groups about ways to solve this problem, but those ideas never panned out (they included handheld radios and VoIP systems). He also wanted to address another problem of General Assemblies – hand signals are used to communicate consensus with ideas. In a massive crowd, it is hard to express opinion through visual cues, so he wanted to integrate this problem into a one package solution.
Thus, Jonathan created a one-way conference call solution, called The People’s Skype, through the Tropo phone system. Using PHP, MongoDB and Tropo, he created a simple interface that anyone with any kind of phone, no matter how old, could dial in and create a unique mic with. Upon mic creation, the speaker is given a 4 digit PIN to distribute to others that want to listen in (by holding up a sign or word of mouth). Anyone can call to the original number and listen by typing the unique PIN. Only the speaker is able to talk, while listeners can vote on issues by using their dial-tone, phone keypad (1 for Yes, 0 for No, etc.).
As the Tropo conference call system is able to support hundreds of people, audience members can either turn their speakerphones on to create a distributed PA system, or listen directly on their handsets. Due to the applications flexibility, it could potentially help fragmented occupiers communicate across police barriers or kettled areas.
Try out The People’s Skype yourself: http://www.peoplesskype.org! You can also download a copy of Jonathan’s source code from Github.
We are proud to feature Speak2Leads on this week’s Tropo Customer Spotlight. I sat down with Sammy James, the Founder and CEO of Speak2Leads, to discuss their business and how they are using Tropo (and Phono).
You have probably heard the old proverb, “the early bird catches the worm”. This phrase was first recorded in John Ray’s A collection of English proverbs from the 17th century. The saying holds true for the first person to speak with a lead.
Speak2Leads’ technology is perfect for connecting the right lead with the right agent over the phone and the right time. Neither party needs to dial the other. Once a web form is submitted or a document is opened, Speak2Leads can place two calls and bridge the two together in a matter of seconds!
Sammy and his team continue to iterate on new features coming to Speak2Leads that improve both customer experience and lead closing rates. Their new feature in the works is a proactive voice call (similar to a proactive chat but better). Using Phono, our Javascript Phone API, an agent will receive a call if someone sits on a webpage for a given amount of time. If the agent would like to speak to the person on their website, an incoming phone call to the webpage is placed allowing the viewer to answer or reject the call for help. I am eagerly looking forward for this amazing idea to launch!
We finally got a chance to catch up with the guys (@_chaselee and @alexschiff) behind the popular new notes service called FetchNotes!
What makes FetchNotes so cool? For one, it has a super simple web UI. The entire site behaves like an app and leverages Python’s Tornado Webserver and AJAX to add and tag notes without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Tags are basically hashtagged keywords in the note that allow the app to categorize notes by topic.
Secondly, FetchNotes leverages Tropo to deliver a truly multichannel communications experience. Today FetchNotes extensively leverages Tropo’s SMS services but the team has already started working on adding Tropo’s Voice with transcription service as well as Tropo’s Instant Messaging services on all of the IM networks including: GTalk, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Jabber! We may even see support in the near future for in-browser, voice-powered note taking using Tropo’s Javascript Phone API, Phono.
Thirdly, Chase and Alex are working to add groups and third-party integration into other services such as GitHub or Google Calendar. This would allow developers, testers, and users to take a note about a #feature or #bug and tag it accordingly and watch the note get pushed to other services as GitHub issues or even calendar entries on Google!
The FetchNotes service is still in private beta but the first 50 new subscribers that click on fetchnotes.com/invite/tropo will be allowed to register for the service and check out the new coolness first hand!
I was privileged to have the opportunity of moderating the Tropo Customer Spotlight session at the Voxeo Customer Summit in Orlando, Florida last week. Six customers each gave a brief presentation on their business followed by a discussion on how they are using Tropo to deliver their Voice, SMS, and Instant Messaging services.
We were fortunate to be able to sit down with Rich Weborg and Heath Phillips of OneReach afterwards to discuss their business in more detail. OneReach provides an easy solution for managing your customer communications using customized voice, text messaging, email and social networking channels to engage your customers with meaningful information in ways they appreciate. Without further ado, here’s our interview.
Another successful Voxeo Customer Summit came and went. This year’s sold out show featured our accomplishments achieved over the past year and highlighted new technology on the roadmaps scheduled for launch over the next year. Voxeo Labs had its own technology track at the show conducting workshops and deep technology dives on Tropo, Phono, SMSified, and the technology that powers it all, PRISM. Also getting a lot of attention at this conference was Rayo, our new real-time communications protocol. Many of these sessions were standing room only!
Our Private Cloud message received much attention at the event. Using our PRISM SIP / Media server, customers can deploy open source cloud instances of Tropo and the Phono Gateway in their own data centers or through public cloud PaaS vendors. In this configuration, Tropo and Phono can be white-labeled to better fit companies’ existing branding strategies. Our APIs can also be extended to better suit your needs. PRISM is truly carrier-grade cloud technology meaning that it can be virtualized to handle an incredibly large number of simultaneous calls using industry standard SIP-based VoIP with multi-tenant capabilities and clustering to offer extremely high availability.
Hands-on workshops for Tropo, Phono, and SMSified were conducted by Mark Headd and Jose de Castro. Customers were developing next generation communicants applications by the end of each session. A deep dive on PRISM and Rayo were conducted by Jose de Castro and the GWOB / Tropo-sponsored BurningMan communications project was recapped by Chris Matthieu.
We would like to thank each and every one of our customers and partners who attended this event. As you probably noticed from attending this event, we are obsessed with your success and feedback. See you again next year!
I recently found myself at a conference without WIFI and i wanted to write and deploy a new Tropo voice application to the cloud. Armed with my 3g iPad, this task was a snap! See for yourself…
If you’re in San Francisco Monday and Tuesday (September 26-27), stop by the Mission Bay Conference Center for GigaOm’s Mobilize conference. Voxeo Labs will be there demoing with some of the gear used to run the free wireless network & Tropo apps that debuted at this year’s Burning Man festival. From the Mobilize website:
Opportunity. Everywhere. That’s the theme of Mobilize 2011, and why, this year, our Mobilize event is doubling in scope, providing you two days of insight and analysis. The conjunction of mobile computing and cloud-based services will unleash an entire new wave of product and market growth. At this year’s Mobilize 2011, we’ll show you how Cloud Computing and Mobile Web creates the beginning of further opportunity.
I also snagged quite a few of the limited edition RINGER Tropo Invader shirts from Orlando before I left so make sure to stop by our table, see a demo and get a free shirt (they’re all the rage).
