The number of APIs available are increasing by the day and so is the popularity of Node.JS, the server-side event-driven javascript framework. This got me thinking… How cool would it be to be able to call or sms an API with your phone using Node.JS?
This is a pretty simple thing to do with Tropo and Nodester. Tropo has an NPM module available for adding Voice, SMS, and Instant Messaging to Node.JS applications and Nodester has REST APIs available to report on the status of the platform. 25 lines of Node.JS code later, we now have an Node.JS application using the Tropo API to dial and sms the API to retrieve the status of the platform.
Here’s the phone number: (480) 428-8723 to call or SMS.
Run this code on localhost or deploy it to a Node.JS hosting service like Nodester.
var http = require('http');
var tropowebapi = require('tropo-webapi');
var request = require('request');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
// Create a new instance of the TropoWebAPI object.
var tropo = new tropowebapi.TropoWebAPI();
// Fetch Nodester status -> http://api.nodester.com/status
// returns {"status":"up","appshosted":2878,"appsrunning":1759}
request('http://api.nodester.com/status', function (error, response, body) {
if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
// console.log(body) // Print status
var statusreq = JSON.parse(body);
tropo.say('nodester is ' + statusreq["status"] + ' and hosting ' + statusreq["appshosted"] + ' applications with '+ statusreq["appsrunning"] + ' running at the moment ');
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'application/json'});
res.end(tropowebapi.TropoJSON(tropo));
}
})
}).listen(13151);
One of the really cool things about the Tropo API is that you can write your app one time and it automatically runs on multiple communications channels such as: Voice, SMS, and Instant Message.
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.
We are excited to feature flockNote on this week’s Tropo Customer Spotlight! Today I sat down with Matthew Warner, the Founder of flockNote, and Jeff Geerling, their CTO, to discuss their business and learn more about how they are using Tropo for their Voice and SMS services.
What is flockNote?
flockNote is a custom registration and communication tool that takes care of your bulk emailing, text messaging, phone calling, social media and more – all from one place.
flockNote is made specifically for Catholic parishes, dioceses and organizations who want to connect with their members using the most effective communication tools of today.
It’s simple, friendly and effective. And it gives your leadership team a powerful way to organize and manage all of your communications across your many ministries.
flockNote uses PHP, Drupal, and the Tropo Scripting API to deliver Voice and SMS services to parishioners. They even use one of Tropo’s SMS short codes (84576) to deliver a very high volume of SMS messages on-demand as needed by churches.
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 remember watching the movie Sneakers (probably 20 times) and would always rewind the part where they could unlock doors with their voice.
The technology, known as voice print identification or voice bio authorization, was demonstrated by the geek Werner Brandes when he utters the words, “My voice is my password. Verify me”, to gain entry to his high-tech office.
This has always sounded uber, geeky, cool to me and it’s been on my list of hacks to try out on Tropo but it looks like someone beat me to it!
The guys over at Disruptive Technologies recently wrote a blog post about Voice Biometrics with VoiceVault and Tropo! To simplify using the VoiceVault API, Disruptive Technologies created a PHP library that can be used with Tropo for both the enrollment and the verification of voices prints. The library is available on Github as part of their sample WordPress Plugin.
Their sample WordPress Plugin was developed to show you how voice biometrics can be used in real life. You can add it to any WordPress site to enhance the user Signup and Password Reset functionality with voice biometrics and Tropo!
If you want to checkout how the plugin works, first browse to this Sign Up Page and sign up for an account. You will receive a phone call asking you, a couple of times, to speak a 4 digit code, this is used to enroll your voice. After enrolling your voice you can call+1(818) 533-9824 to receive a new temporary password to login to WordPress. Make sure to call from the phone number you registered when you signed up for the WordPress account!
Image the communications apps that you could build using this technology! The future is now so what are you waiting for – add voice bio metrics to your apps today using Tropo and VoiceVault thanks to Disruptive Technologies!
Most businesses have a customer defection issue where customers try the product, service or venue once, never to return. This has a massive cash impact on the business as new customers need to be recruited to replace the ones that leave. More worryingly, most businesses have no idea why customers defect so they cant repair whatever is broken in the offer – so customers continue to leave
This is the problem that Portland based, Opiniator is helping solve and is using Tropo as its backbone technology.
Businesses can now collect point of experience feedback from their customers whilst they are consuming the product or experiencing the service. They do this via SMS, voice or any internet enabled device – via Tropo, on the customer’s own cell phone or web enabled device.
Opiniator takes this feedback data and analyzes it in real-time, whilst the customer is still there. This means that the business can fix any issues, salvage any customer and ensure the offer is satisfying the needs of it’s customer base.
Founded by Matt Selbie, the company launched in 2009 but switched to Tropo earlier this year. Retail, Financial Services, Medical, Auto and Events are the key markets for the company – with current clients including Planned Parenthood and the Oregon Convention Center.
“The big benefits are that the business is getting analyzed feedback on what the customer is experiencing right there and then – which means they can fix, adjust and implement based on real data, not guesswork and Tropo’s platform allows us to do this quickly and with scale using a variety of convenient methods for the customers” – Matt Selbie, Founder
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.
VivaGrams was pitched as a wellness startup helping early adopters change their behavior to become healthier and happier people. Users of the site could work with their care providers to establish healthy nutritional and/or exercise based programs and receive reminders via phone calls, SMS text messages, or Twitter.
Of course, VivaGrams used Tropo for its Voice, SMS, and Twitter integration. Within the first 15 minutes of the competition, Vivagrams was sending out SMS messages. Within the next 30 minutes we were placing phone calls to users and collecting input via speech recognition. The call script was as follows:
1. This call is from Vivagrams.
2. Did you eat your banana today? Say yes or press 1 or say no or press 2.
3. On a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being awesome, how happy are you today?
4. Keep up the good work!
Next we added Twitter support to VivaGrams using the Tropo API. We were initially looking to add Twitter support as Direct Messages but DMs are on the roadmap for a future delivery. Instead we integrated Tropo as public tweets/mentions and found this to be as simple as sending and receiving SMS messages. The only difference was linking the Twitter account and specifying Twitter as the network.
We proved that it was totally possible to build a company including the technology, brand, and business model in 54 hours! We met a bunch of new friends and awesomely creative people from this event. Here are a few other photos from the event!
Who doesn’t love peanut butter and chocolate? By themselves, they are equally delicious but together, they are irresistible!
The same can now be said about Heroku and Tropo. Heroku is the super simple cloud hosting platform for Ruby and Ruby on Rails web applications. While Tropo is the super simple cloud hosting platform for communications applications including Voice, SMS, IM, and Twitter.
While Tropo works with any web programming language, we have been seeing more and more Ruby applications being developed using Tropo’s WebAPI. Traditionally deploying an application took just about as much time as actually writing the application. This is no longer true with Heroku’s cloud hosting platform.
Deploying a Ruby application to Heroku is as simple as issuing the following commands from your terminal window:
> heroku create
> git push heroku master
Equally as simple to deploying your application to Heroku is writing your multi-channel communications application using Tropo like this hello world application that can be accessed via the telephone using Voice or SMS or via Instant Message or Twitter:
answer
say “Yes, Tropo is this easy!”
hangup
Now on to the how-to video and Heroku deployment instructions located at http://tropo.heroku.com!
To demonstrate this yummy combination of technologies (Heroku and Tropo), Mark Silverberg (student and talented freelance Tropo developer) built a powerful Voice and IM application using Ruby and the Sinatra Framework and walks us through his 3.5 minute start-to-finish deployment of this application on the Heroku platform!
Mark’s multi-channel application is a volunteer finder service that provides information on volunteer opportunities in your zipcode. The application can be accessed by calling +99000936 9991456957 via Skype or by IMing volunteer1234@tropo.im. Mark’s Ruby code can be found on GitHub along with deployment instructions hosted on Heroku at http://warm-spring-38.heroku.com/
Now follow along with this video at http://tropo.heroku.com to learn how to build and deploy your next billion dollar idea using Heroku and Tropo! Leveraging Heroku and Tropo gives you the best of advancements in cloud technology available today. Heroku’s cloud technology allows you to scale your web application while Tropo’s cloud technology allows you to scale your communications applications. These hybrid cloud technologies provide you, the web developer, with peace of mind and assurance that when your new application goes viral, we can easily scale to meet your demand. Best of all, both cloud platforms offer free entry points to kick our tires and try us out.
So what are you waiting for? Taste our peanut butter and chocolate now at Heroku and Tropo!
We receive many testimonials from customers who love our cloud communications services. With each testimonial, you realize just how lucky you are to be part of an organization that is consistently hitting the mark customer by customer and sustaining growth based on our 24/7 customer service, ease-of-use, proven ability to scale, and our breadth of technologies.
Today we received an email from a customer using Tropo’s Voice and SMS API for their mission critical “FlightRecordAir” (as in Black Box) product, an On-Air audio automation system, AirForce(tm). Tropo forms the notification component of a broadcast transmitter remote control and monitoring program. The program monitors power output, various temperatures, currents and voltages and if any points fall above or below “warning” or “danger” setpoint levels, the application uses Tropo to begin calling a list of engineers until it reaches someone that can acknowledge the alarm and take action. Similarly, lesser warnings generate SMS text messages that are sent to another call list, and Tropo’s simple scripting structure allowed them to use the same code to send text messages and place voice calls. This use case demonstrates the power of Tropo’s multi-modal capabilities!
Below is the testimonial quote from the Founder of MacroMedia, Inc., Tim Valley:
“Tropo is the right choice for us because it offers 24/7 support, very high reliability and repeatability, extensive error and status logging, and the implementation was painless and fast. Security is transparent yet bulletproof. It only took a couple of hours (from sign-up to fully functional) to build a relatively complex system with branching, parameters, voice recognition, calling and SMS. Our implementation uses PHP scripts, hosted on our own site, along with a Delphi front-end. No libraries or binaries needed to be installed on the server.”
Please continue to keep your feedback coming in to us. We appreciate all the you help us become.
