The app they developed – PhillySNAP – makes use of the SMSified API to let people find SNAP retailers in their neighborhoods.

This innovative app was honored yesterday by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski as a winner in the Apps for Communities Challenge

A video overview of the PhillySNAP service can be seen below.

In addition, the team worked with the Philadelphia Department of Health and the Food Trust to disseminate information on the program to needy Philadelphians. Some of the Food Trust’s literature featuring PhillySNAP can be seen below.

Congratulations to the entire PhillySNAP team on a job well done!

©2011 SMSified. All Rights Reserved.

.

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

If you are not familiar with our Phono Mobile SDK, it is an extension of Phono that lets you run your existing browser-based PhonoSDK applications on iOS and Android devices as native applications using the PhoneGap mobile platform.

In addition to running VoIP, SIP-based Voice communications on iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) and Android devices, Phono also supports XMPP-based Instant Messaing via a simple jQuery-based developer SDK.

Here’s the video. Enjoy!

©2011 The Phono Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

Note: For most consumer-facing sites, we still recommend using Flash due to its more pervasive deployment base.

If you would prefer to use our Java Applet on the desktop, we have provided a new audio property on Phono and a Java Applet availability detector. It sets the desired audio client to engage on the web browser or mobile device. Valid options include: auto, flash, java, and none.  This property is optional and is defaulted to auto which means:

• if on desktop, flash
• if on android, android
• if on ios, ios

We have provided a handy Java detection utility that can used like so.  Note: If Java is not detected, Phono will fallback to Flash.

$(document).ready(function(){
var audioType = 'auto';
if (navigator.javaEnabled()) {
    audioType = 'java';
}

Once you have determined if Java is installed on the your client, you can now set the audio property when initializing Phono in your jQuery script like so:

var phono = $.phono({
  apiKey: "YOUR_KEY_GOES_HERE",
  audio: {type:audioType},
  onReady: function(event) {
   // stuff
 }
});

Note: If you are running MacOS Lion, you may need to follow these instructions for getting Java applets to automatically load in your web browser.

©2011 The Phono Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

Today Voxeo Labs is releasing PhonoSDK version 0.3! This is a major step forward in our commitment this opensource JavaScript Phone API project. Here is a list of new features supported in version 0.3:

• Java Applet version of Phono is now included in the SDK! This version has even lower latency than our current Flash-based version of the SDK making this solution perfect for enterprise call centers and companies/individuals who prefer to use Java applets over Flash.
• HTTPS support for secured signaling on the network.
• HD Audio (wideband) support for Phono-to-Phono and Phono-to-SIP clients and SIP-to-Phono connections for VoIP calling.
• Improved latency with updated Flash version of PhonoSDK.
• Phono Mobile support for PhoneGap 1.1 (with support for 1.2 coming shortly).

Upgrading from PhonoSDK 0.2 to 0.3 is easy.  Simply change 0.2 to 0.3 in your jquery.phono.js URL path like this:

http://s.phono.com/releases/0.3/jquery.phono.js

Stay tuned for more blog posts demonstrating unique features of our latest version of PhonoSDK!

©2011 The Phono Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

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!

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

Related posts:

1. Customer Spotlight: FetchNotes
2. Customer Spotlight: Speak2Leads
3. Customer Spotlight: Radish Systems

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

Tropo is excited to partner with Apigee on the Tropo API Explorer! The API Explorer allows more developers to explore, learn, and test Tropo’s cloud communications APIs faster than ever before.

Tropo provides an API and cloud communications platform for building powerful Voice applications with speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages, call recording, conferencing, SIP/VoIP, and phone numbers in 41 countries. Tropo also provides international SMS services.

The API Explorer makes this integration easier, helping developers authenticate and test our API in seconds, view the full surface area of an API, view request/response pairs in only a few clicks and share what they are seeing with others.

Now you can use the Apigee API explorer to experiment with our REST API without writing a single line of code! It is built with Apigee To-Go, a free product to let users build, skin and embed their own API Console. The Tropo API Explorer is embedded below or you can jump to this full screen version.

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

No related posts.

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

We like to get our happy hours on early so be ready to break some New Year’s resolutions with us at 3:58pm.  Yep, 3:58pm.  Because two minutes can make the world of a difference for your weekend.

End your work week early and shimmy by the Tropo office for some beers, bites and a lil’ rock jam session if you are so inclined.

Tropo Drinkup San Francisco

When: Friday January 27th

Where: 28 2nd Street 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94123

Time: 3:58pm- 6:00pm

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

Related posts:

1. Palo Alto Startup Drinkup Wednesday 1/12
2. South Beach Startup Drinkup Tonight!
3. Philadelphia Startup Drinkup

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

That’s why we’re extremely pleased to announce that Tropo is partnering with Newspepper, TheNextWeb, i/o Ventures, Startup Bus, Startup America (and a whole lot more!) to launch Startup World!

Startup World is a global competition to find the next big thing. The competition will be held in 36 cities world-wide, with the regional winners flying to Silicon Valley for a grand showdown to battle it out in front of a panel of expert judges to be crowned the “world’s best startup”.

We’ll be kicking off Startup World at a Launch Party at i/o Ventures in San Francisco on Tuesday Jan 24th 2012.   Come join us for the fun and some awesome speakers including Sarah Lacy!

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

Related posts:

1. Tropo joins Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA & The World Bank for Random Hacks of Kindness
2. Tropo Sponsors Startup Weekend Phoenix!
3. Pitching to Win at Philly Startup Weekend

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

Phono is a free HTML5 jQuery-based web phone that you can add to any web page to place or receive open SIP-based VoIP calls to/from any web browser (or iOS/Android mobile device using Phono Mobile)!

Phono can be connected to Tropo to place or receive phone calls to/from real telephone numbers! Phono can also interact with Tropo voice applications directly from a web page using Tropo’s speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages as well as record and play media such as WAV or MP3 files or conduct conference calls, call transfers, call recording, etc.

To make things even better, Phono and Tropo both support SIP headers which are basically key/value pairs of data that you can sent along with calls. SIP headers are very common in call center applications and enterprise screen-pop implementations. Using SIP headers allows Phono to place a call into a Tropo application and pass along data instructing Tropo to transfer the call to another telephone number. This is how all of the click-to-call demo applications work on phono.com. These demo applications are also limited to 10 minutes in length so that you can experience the quality of a Phono call and write your own Tropo application for longer calls.

Because we have had a few questions lately on this topic, I wanted to provide some sample code for both Phono and Tropo to make this easier for you to apply to your application. This demo application allows you to enter a phone number on a web page and call it using Phono and Tropo. The web page has a simple form that asks for a phone number and has a call button that initiates a SIP VoIP call to Tropo app:9996182316. Reviewing the Phono code below, you will find that it uses jQuery to pass the phone number value in the textbox to Tropo as a SIP header.

<html>
  <head>
    <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
    <script src="http://s.phono.com/releases/0.3/jquery.phono.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
	<input id="phonenumber" type="text">
    <input id="call" type="button" disabled="true" value="Loading..." />
    <span id="status"></span>
    <script>
    $(document).ready(function(){
      var phono = $.phono({
        apiKey: "your secret key",
        onReady: function() {
          $("#call").attr("disabled", false).val("Call");
        }
      });

      $("#call").click(function() {
        $("#call").attr("disabled", true).val("Busy");
        phono.phone.dial("app:9996182316", {
		  	headers: [
			             {
			               name:"x-numbertodial",
			               value:$('#phonenumber').val()
			             }
			           ],
          onRing: function() {
            $("#status").html("Ringing");
          },
          onAnswer: function() {
            $("#status").html("Answered");
          },
          onHangup: function() {
            $("#call").attr("disabled", false).val("Call");
            $("#status").html("Hungup");
          }
        });
      });
    })
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

You could write a Tropo transfer application using the Scripting API in one line of Ruby code that transfers the call to the phone number in the SIP header like this:

transfer $currentCall.getHeader("x-numbertodial")

What if you wanted to add a timer that ends the call after 10 minutes like we do on phono.com for demo purposes? This feature is also simple but it requires multithreading your Ruby application and using our REST API for sending a signal to interrupt the transfer method once your timer reaches its alarm.

require "net/http"

# Create second thread for timer and announcements
Thread.new do
  sleep 600 # Note: Sleep is in seconds so 600 = 10 minutes

  http = Net::HTTP.new "api.tropo.com"

  request = Net::HTTP::Get.new "/1.0/sessions/#{$currentCall.sessionId}/signals?action=signal&value=limitreached"
  response = http.request request
end

say "hold please while we transfer your call."
transfer $currentCall.getHeader("x-numbertodial"), :allowsignals => "limitreached"
say "your limit has been reached."

That’s cool but what if you wanted to block certain phone numbers or limit the demo calls to North America? You could add area codes or phone numbers to a regex array and check the desired phone number against the list of regexes to see if you should allow the call to transfer or not like this example:

phone = $currentCall.getHeader "x-numbertodial"

# Blocked North American area codes
blocked = [
  /^\+?1?8[024]9/,
  /^\+?1?26[48]/,
  /^\+?1?24[26]/,
  /^\+?1?34[05]/,
  /^\+?1?[62]84/,
  /^\+?1?67[10]/,
  /^\+?1?78[47]/,
  /^\+?1?8[024]9/,
  /^\+?1?86[89]/,
  /^\+?1?441/,
  /^\+?1?473/,
  /^\+?1?664/,
  /^\+?1?649/,
  /^\+?1?721/,
  /^\+?1?758/,
  /^\+?1?767/,
  /^\+?1?876/,
  /^\+?1?939/
]

block_call = blocked.any? { |x| phone =~ x }

You could add this code immediately above your transfer and add a conditional statement that says something like this example:

if block_call
  say "calls to this area code are blocked."
else
  say "hold please while we transfer your call."
  transfer phone, :allowsignals => "limitreached"
  say "your limit has been reached."
end

You could also add billing functionality to the Tropo script by applying a rate based on country code and multiply it times the number of seconds that the call was in progress. To accomplish this goal, you would add a timestamp at the beginning of the script and a timestamp directly following the transfer method. When either party hangs up, the Tropo script will continue running with the line immediately following the blocked method such as transfer in this case.

If necessary, you could also check to see if the Phono caller is still on the call by interrogating the $currentCall.isActive property or by wrapping your entire application in a while loop like this example:

while $currentCall.isActive
  # Do Stuff
end

I think that should get you started! You can now build your next-generation click-to-call application using Phono and Tropo! Please let us know how you are using Phono with your Tropo applications

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

Related posts:

1. 2 Lines of Code To Enable Calling 1 Phone Number And Ringing Multiple Phone Numbers (like Google Voice)
2. How to Build a VoIP-Based Baby Monitor
3. Dial Multiple Phone and SIP Numbers & First to Answer Wins

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

Tropo will be deprecating two features at the end of this month.

• Instant Messaging and Twitter – Sending instant messages to your application was a fun idea and we used this a lot internally to test text applications, but shifting network protocols and uncooperative IM services meant we spent a lot of effort on the feature for very little positive result. We will be disabling the ability to add new IM networks shortly, and turning off the IM servers on January 28. Read more about this change here.
• Skype numbers – Providing each application a Skype number allowed developers to test incoming calls to their applications. Unlike all of our other phone numbers and VoIP access, this was one-way: you could not call out with Skype. The Microsoft acquisition of Skype has left even this limited support with an uncertain future. You can continue to test your applications with SIP, phone numbers, or Phono. We’ve even embedded Phono so you can dial your applications with one click. Read more about this change here.

Changing and shaping the future of communications takes a lot of focus, and sometimes requires us to reassess the past. We’ve learned a lot from our Skype and IM support, and will put that knowledge to work in creating more great things in the future.

Deprecating these features is the first step in allowing us to focus on things that our users truly want. Look for a lot of great things coming from Tropo in the coming weeks and months.

Stay tuned!

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

Related posts:

1. Handling regular users vs casual users via the text channel
2. Voxeo announces COBOL support for Tropo.com voice app platform
3. How to Add Twitter Support to a Tropo.com App – Step by Step

©2012 Voxeo Labs. All Rights Reserved.

The conference has over 50 sessions and a variety of Keynote and General Sessions hosted by industry thought leaders, covering a full range of applications surrounding these key themes:

• Cloud-based Communications Services and Systems
• Managing and Securing Converged Networks
• Mobility
• SIP Trunking
• Social Apps and Networks
• Strategies for Communications and Collaboration
• Unified Communications
• Video

Interested in joining us? Take advantage of this promotional offer: Save 35% off the on-site price for the Entire Event and 3-Day Conference Packages or register for a Free Expo Pass with Priority Code CPHVVR278.

We hope to see you there! If you’ll be at Enterprise Connect and would like to set up a meeting or take a tour of our office, contact Samantha Seidman at sseidman@voxeo.com.

©2012 Voxeo Talks. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Join Voxeo at Enterprise Connect to Learn About SIP, Open Source
2. Voxeo’s Dan York to speak at Enterprise 2.0 Conf June 24 in Boston
3. MicroMessenger: The First Voxeo Connect Certified Partner Application

View the presentation, and check out some of Pavel’s other related tutorials:

©2012 Voxeo Developers Corner. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Slides from T-Mobile: How To Enhance An Existing VoiceObjects Voice App With a Text Channel
2. Video: Quick Overview of Converting Nortel PeriPro Apps Using the VoiceObjects Migration Manager
3. In the new year, have you tried VoiceObjects? (It’s free to download)

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!

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Customer Spotlight: FetchNotes
2. Customer Spotlight: Speak2Leads
3. Customer Spotlight: Radish Systems

Tropo is excited to partner with Apigee on the Tropo API Explorer! The API Explorer allows more developers to explore, learn, and test Tropo’s cloud communications APIs faster than ever before.

Tropo provides an API and cloud communications platform for building powerful Voice applications with speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages, call recording, conferencing, SIP/VoIP, and phone numbers in 41 countries. Tropo also provides international SMS services.

The API Explorer makes this integration easier, helping developers authenticate and test our API in seconds, view the full surface area of an API, view request/response pairs in only a few clicks and share what they are seeing with others.

Now you can use the Apigee API explorer to experiment with our REST API without writing a single line of code! It is built with Apigee To-Go, a free product to let users build, skin and embed their own API Console. The Tropo API Explorer is embedded below or you can jump to this full screen version.

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

No related posts.

We like to get our happy hours on early so be ready to break some New Year’s resolutions with us at 3:58pm.  Yep, 3:58pm.  Because two minutes can make the world of a difference for your weekend.

End your work week early and shimmy by the Tropo office for some beers, bites and a lil’ rock jam session if you are so inclined.

Tropo Drinkup San Francisco

When: Friday January 27th

Where: 28 2nd Street 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94123

Time: 3:58pm- 6:00pm

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Palo Alto Startup Drinkup Wednesday 1/12
2. South Beach Startup Drinkup Tonight!
3. Philadelphia Startup Drinkup

MicroMessenger provides a standards-based, fully hosted solution for proactive, event-based customer care, with complete, turnkey campaign management for interactive, outbound service and notifications. The platform is extremely flexible, so whether you’re working on ad-hoc projects such as sending seasonal notifications, or powering core business processes like verifications and appointment scheduling, you’ll be able to develop campaigns easily, and quickly show a return on your investment due to MicroMessenger’s low-cost startup and on-demand access. And with MicroMessenger’s hosting on the Voxeo Prophecy cloud, you have a 100% uptime guarantee on a reliable IVR platform with no large upfront investment in on-premise equipment.

Sample applications include:

• Payment reminders
• Shipping notifications
• Targeted product offers
• Service changes/outages/interruptions
• Employee alerts
• Appointment reminders/confirmations/rescheduling
• Emergency alerts
• Personalized information delivery
• Seasonal campaigns

Looking for more info on best practices in outbound customer service and proactive customer engagement? Check out the Voxeo/MicroAutomation whitepaper on the business case for Outbound IVR, then learn more about Voxeo Outbound IVR /SMS and MicroAutomation MicroMessenger.

©2012 Voxeo Talks. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Voxeo and TradeHarbor partner to provide voice biometrics and fight identity theft
2. Join Voxeo at Enterprise Connect to Learn About SIP, Open Source
3. Join Voxeo at Enterprise Connect in Orlando!

That’s why we’re extremely pleased to announce that Tropo is partnering with Newspepper, TheNextWeb, i/o Ventures, Startup Bus, Startup America (and a whole lot more!) to launch Startup World!

Startup World is a global competition to find the next big thing. The competition will be held in 36 cities world-wide, with the regional winners flying to Silicon Valley for a grand showdown to battle it out in front of a panel of expert judges to be crowned the “world’s best startup”.

We’ll be kicking off Startup World at a Launch Party at i/o Ventures in San Francisco on Tuesday Jan 24th 2012.   Come join us for the fun and some awesome speakers including Sarah Lacy!

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Tropo joins Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA & The World Bank for Random Hacks of Kindness
2. Tropo Sponsors Startup Weekend Phoenix!
3. Pitching to Win at Philly Startup Weekend

Phono is a free HTML5 jQuery-based web phone that you can add to any web page to place or receive open SIP-based VoIP calls to/from any web browser (or iOS/Android mobile device using Phono Mobile)!

Phono can be connected to Tropo to place or receive phone calls to/from real telephone numbers! Phono can also interact with Tropo voice applications directly from a web page using Tropo’s speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages as well as record and play media such as WAV or MP3 files or conduct conference calls, call transfers, call recording, etc.

To make things even better, Phono and Tropo both support SIP headers which are basically key/value pairs of data that you can sent along with calls. SIP headers are very common in call center applications and enterprise screen-pop implementations. Using SIP headers allows Phono to place a call into a Tropo application and pass along data instructing Tropo to transfer the call to another telephone number. This is how all of the click-to-call demo applications work on phono.com. These demo applications are also limited to 10 minutes in length so that you can experience the quality of a Phono call and write your own Tropo application for longer calls.

Because we have had a few questions lately on this topic, I wanted to provide some sample code for both Phono and Tropo to make this easier for you to apply to your application. This demo application allows you to enter a phone number on a web page and call it using Phono and Tropo. The web page has a simple form that asks for a phone number and has a call button that initiates a SIP VoIP call to Tropo app:9996182316. Reviewing the Phono code below, you will find that it uses jQuery to pass the phone number value in the textbox to Tropo as a SIP header.

<html>
  <head>
    <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
    <script src="http://s.phono.com/releases/0.3/jquery.phono.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
	<input id="phonenumber" type="text">
    <input id="call" type="button" disabled="true" value="Loading..." />
    <span id="status"></span>
    <script>
    $(document).ready(function(){
      var phono = $.phono({
        apiKey: "your secret key",
        onReady: function() {
          $("#call").attr("disabled", false).val("Call");
        }
      });

      $("#call").click(function() {
        $("#call").attr("disabled", true).val("Busy");
        phono.phone.dial("app:9996182316", {
		  	headers: [
			             {
			               name:"x-numbertodial",
			               value:$('#phonenumber').val()
			             }
			           ],
          onRing: function() {
            $("#status").html("Ringing");
          },
          onAnswer: function() {
            $("#status").html("Answered");
          },
          onHangup: function() {
            $("#call").attr("disabled", false).val("Call");
            $("#status").html("Hungup");
          }
        });
      });
    })
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

You could write a Tropo transfer application using the Scripting API in one line of Ruby code that transfers the call to the phone number in the SIP header like this:

transfer $currentCall.getHeader("x-numbertodial")

What if you wanted to add a timer that ends the call after 10 minutes like we do on phono.com for demo purposes? This feature is also simple but it requires multithreading your Ruby application and using our REST API for sending a signal to interrupt the transfer method once your timer reaches its alarm.

require "net/http"

# Create second thread for timer and announcements
Thread.new do
  sleep 600 # Note: Sleep is in seconds so 600 = 10 minutes

  http = Net::HTTP.new "api.tropo.com"

  request = Net::HTTP::Get.new "/1.0/sessions/#{$currentCall.sessionId}/signals?action=signal&value=limitreached"
  response = http.request request
end

say "hold please while we transfer your call."
transfer $currentCall.getHeader("x-numbertodial"), :allowsignals => "limitreached"
say "your limit has been reached."

That’s cool but what if you wanted to block certain phone numbers or limit the demo calls to North America? You could add area codes or phone numbers to a regex array and check the desired phone number against the list of regexes to see if you should allow the call to transfer or not like this example:

phone = $currentCall.getHeader "x-numbertodial"

# Blocked North American area codes
blocked = [
  /^\+?1?8[024]9/,
  /^\+?1?26[48]/,
  /^\+?1?24[26]/,
  /^\+?1?34[05]/,
  /^\+?1?[62]84/,
  /^\+?1?67[10]/,
  /^\+?1?78[47]/,
  /^\+?1?8[024]9/,
  /^\+?1?86[89]/,
  /^\+?1?441/,
  /^\+?1?473/,
  /^\+?1?664/,
  /^\+?1?649/,
  /^\+?1?721/,
  /^\+?1?758/,
  /^\+?1?767/,
  /^\+?1?876/,
  /^\+?1?939/
]

block_call = blocked.any? { |x| phone =~ x }

You could add this code immediately above your transfer and add a conditional statement that says something like this example:

if block_call
  say "calls to this area code are blocked."
else
  say "hold please while we transfer your call."
  transfer phone, :allowsignals => "limitreached"
  say "your limit has been reached."
end

You could also add billing functionality to the Tropo script by applying a rate based on country code and multiply it times the number of seconds that the call was in progress. To accomplish this goal, you would add a timestamp at the beginning of the script and a timestamp directly following the transfer method. When either party hangs up, the Tropo script will continue running with the line immediately following the blocked method such as transfer in this case.

If necessary, you could also check to see if the Phono caller is still on the call by interrogating the $currentCall.isActive property or by wrapping your entire application in a while loop like this example:

while $currentCall.isActive
  # Do Stuff
end

I think that should get you started! You can now build your next-generation click-to-call application using Phono and Tropo! Please let us know how you are using Phono with your Tropo applications :)

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. 2 Lines of Code To Enable Calling 1 Phone Number And Ringing Multiple Phone Numbers (like Google Voice)
2. How to Build a VoIP-Based Baby Monitor
3. Dial Multiple Phone and SIP Numbers & First to Answer Wins

• High-tech entrepreneurs
• Designers
• Developers
• Social media professionals
• Bloggers
• Investors
• Students

To get an idea of the Venture Lounge experience and what a great space our Town Square is for networking in a laid-back atmosphere – check out this slideshow from the 2011 Venture Lounge at Voxeo:

Ready to register? Visit the Florida Technology Journal’s website. You can also RSVP on Facebook to invite friends and see who else is attending, but be sure you submit a formal registration request through FTJ!

©2012 Voxeo Talks. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Are you an analyst or blogger at SpeechTEK or in NYC? Please join us for dinner Tuesday, Aug 25, 2009
2. Meet Voxeo’s Customer Summit Sponsors in our Unlocked and Loaded Demo Lounge
3. Voxeo’s Growth Featured in the Orlando Business Journal

• Voxeo Prophecy Overview (Free)
• Voxeo VoiceObjects Overview (Free)
• Prophecy Installation and Administration
• VoiceObjects Installation and Administration
• Developing Voice Applications using Designer
• Developing Voice Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop (Free)
• Developing Text and Mobile Web Applications using VoiceObjects Desktop
• VoiceObjects Development Best Practices
• VoiceObjects for User Interface Designers
• Grammar Development
• CCXML
• InfoStore and VoiceObjects Analyzer

A wide variety of other classes, including certification courses, are available by request. For more information and to register online, review the Voxeo University schedule on our website.

©2012 Voxeo University. All Rights Reserved.

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Over the past few years, several initiatives have demonstrated the power of simple mobile services to help further development of rural economies. However, most of those were based on SMS, available on most phones, but not conducive for use by people with low literacy or a speaking language not supported by a phone keyboard.

In attempt to overcome those obstacles and help connect farmers, producers and radio stations in the Republic of Mali, a landlocked country in Western Africa without a telephony infrastructure, the EU-funded VOICES project turned to Voxeo for one of their independent platforms.

The VOICES team (staffed by the Web Foundation and VU University) has developed a stand-alone platform powered by a solar pane (see photo) based on Voxeo products. The laptop hosts the complete environment (LAMP) plus a Voxeo Prophecy IVR server for the voice platform. For the telephony hardware, an appliance called Office Route with four GSM ports was utilized. It is believed that this is the first stand-alone VoiceXML browser platform that doesn’t require power.

VOICES is a collaboration of 12 partners from France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Senegal, South Africa, Portugal and Mali. While the current focus of one the targeted pilot projects is the broadcast of agricultural information, the sky’s the limit when people are given a voice.

©2012 Voxeo Talks. All Rights Reserved.

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Tropo will be deprecating two features at the end of this month.

• Instant Messaging and Twitter – Sending instant messages to your application was a fun idea and we used this a lot internally to test text applications, but shifting network protocols and uncooperative IM services meant we spent a lot of effort on the feature for very little positive result. We will be disabling the ability to add new IM networks shortly, and turning off the IM servers on January 28. Read more about this change here.
• Skype numbers – Providing each application a Skype number allowed developers to test incoming calls to their applications. Unlike all of our other phone numbers and VoIP access, this was one-way: you could not call out with Skype. The Microsoft acquisition of Skype has left even this limited support with an uncertain future. You can continue to test your applications with SIP, phone numbers, or Phono. We’ve even embedded Phono so you can dial your applications with one click. Read more about this change here.

Changing and shaping the future of communications takes a lot of focus, and sometimes requires us to reassess the past. We’ve learned a lot from our Skype and IM support, and will put that knowledge to work in creating more great things in the future.

Deprecating these features is the first step in allowing us to focus on things that our users truly want. Look for a lot of great things coming from Tropo in the coming weeks and months.

Stay tuned!

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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We also had learned that one of our adopted families was in need of a simple ramp and hand rails. This elderly couple had been on a waiting list for years to have a ramp installed so that the wife, who had a stroke eight years ago, could achieve more independent mobility. We’d like to give special thanks to Tony Hanson, of Interstruct, Inc – the contractor that built our new office space – who joined us to assist in providing these very important improvements to the family’s home.

Mac Hammond describes the emotional response of one of the recipients: “She was crying and thanking us as we finished.  We told her that this was from a great company and that we were just the representatives.  She cried some more and said, ‘this has been a horrible year, thank you for making it better.’  I realized that this was a family, much like many of ours, who have come on hard times.  They live in desperation in the midst of a typical American neighborhood.  Thank you Voxeons for making their lives a bit happier at this time of year.  As we left the house, two teenaged boys came in.  We exchanged holiday greetings.  They will have a happy Christmas due to your generosity.”

To everyone who was part of this year’s Adopt-a-Family at Voxeo, thank you for making it a more enjoyable holiday season for these three families!

©2012 Voxeo Talks. All Rights Reserved.

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Call setups per second matter, too.  If a box is rated with high port counts but the call setups per second is not correspondingly high, you may not be able to handle the rate of traffic and your ports will be idle.  For example, take 25 call setups per second times 30 seconds per call.  To go from zero to peak traffic, you start up 25 new calls every second for thirty seconds.  That gives you 25 times 30, equaling 750 calls started up in 30 seconds.  If your call lengths were only six seconds, because maybe you’re doing a voting application or something like that, you would peak at 25 * 6 = 150 calls.  Most Voxeo applications have a call duration of about 60 seconds, so Prophecy 11.5 has a call setup per second rate that is well matched to making sure you can get the optimum use out of your Prophecy ports.

©2012 Voxeo Developers Corner. All Rights Reserved.

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In this post I’ll describe how I created a Python script that retrieves your contact list from CC and sends them a text message using Tropo. I’m using a hosted file located on the cloud at Tropo.com for this.

What you’ll need:

• Python
• Your Constant Contact API key (from http://developer.constantcontact.com/)
• Your Constant Contact username and password
• A Tropo account

Let’s start with the easy part, making a hosted Tropo application to send our users a message.

1. Log in to tropo.com
2. From “Your Applications”, click “Create New Application”
3. Click “Tropo Scripting”
4. Give your application a name
5. For the URL, click “Hosted File” and then “Create a new hosted file for this application”
6. Fill in the filename (in this example I’m going to use JavaScript on the Tropo side, so I chose test.js)
7. Then just add the following 2 lines of code

call('+' + numberToDial, {
    network:"SMS"});
say(msg);

Then just click “Create File” and then “Create Application”. Once our magic monkey finishes creating your application, you will see the settings page for your application.

Next step is to add a phone number to this application. Click “Add a new phone number” and then choose your area code (Tropo only supports SMS from US and Canadian numbers at this time), then click the plus symbol to add this phone number to the application. Once your have completed these steps you’ll be taken back to the application settings page.

That’s almost all we need from Tropo. Let’s take a look at the Python code:

import urllib
import urllib2
from xml.dom import minidom
cc_url = 'https://api.constantcontact.com/ws/customers/{user_name}/contacts' cc_api_key = '{paste_your_api_key_inbetween_the_quotes}'
cc_username = '{user_name}'
cc_password = '{password}'

TROPO_URL = 'http://api.tropo.com/1.0/sessions?action=create&token={The Outbound Messaging Token goes here}'
SMS_MSG = 'Wishing you a happy holidays! - From the Tropo Team'

This first part, shown above, sets up our URLs – one for Constant Contact and one for Tropo. SMS_MSG will contain the content used as the body of your message.

#CC uses Basic Authentication for their API. This code sets up a password manager to take care of that for us
passman = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
passman.add_password(None, cc_url, cc_api_key + '%' + cc_username, cc_password)
authhandler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(passman)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(authhandler) urllib2.install_opener(opener)

There's some heavy lifting going on here! Constant Contact is configured to require Basic Authentication for their API. Python provides us with a really nice password manager so we don't have to worry about encoding this into our HTTP request.

pagehandle = urllib2.urlopen(cc_url)
data = pagehandle.read()
dom = minidom.parseString(data)
entry_node = dom.getElementsByTagName("entry")

This code above sends a request to Constant Contact and parses the XML result. Each of your contacts is stored as an Entry in the XML data. What we want to do is loop over each one of these entries to get the unique ID:

for entry in entry_node:
	id = entry.getElementsByTagName("id")
	id = id[0].firstChild.nodeValue
	pagehandle = urllib2.urlopen(cc_url + '/' + id.rsplit('/', 1)[1])
	data = pagehandle.read()
	dom = minidom.parseString(data)
	contact_node = dom.getElementsByTagName("Contact")

Now we've iterated over all of our entries, and requested for the Constant Contact API to return the detailed record for each Contact. The field that we'll use to send our contacts an SMS is defined as "HomePhone" in the code below:

	for contact in contact_node:
		phone_num = contact.getElementsByTagName("HomePhone")
		phone_num = phone_num[0].firstChild.nodeValue
		url = TROPO_URL + '&numberToDial=' + phone_num + '&msg=' + urllib.quote(SMS_MSG)
		page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
		data = page.read()

Now we've parsed out the phone number for our users and requested that Tropo send them our season's greetings!

Note: If your phone numbers are not in a 10 digit format, this request will fail.
Note 2: The outbound messaging token can be found under the settings for your application.

This is something that could clearly be extended to a wide range of things: running specials, thanking customers, really the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Also, if you wanted to have Tropo talk to the person instead of send a text message, just make the first line of your hosted application look like this:

call('+' + numberToDial);

To run this, take the script, edit it with your information and run it from a terminal window: python my_script_name.py

And here's the code in full:

import urllib
import urllib2
from xml.dom import minidom

cc_url = 'https://api.constantcontact.com/ws/customers/{user_name}/contacts' cc_api_key = '{paste_your_api_key_inbetween_the_quotes}'
cc_username = '{user_name}'
cc_password = '{password}'

TROPO_URL = 'http://api.tropo.com/1.0/sessions?action=create&token={The Outbound Messaging Token goes here}'
SMS_MSG = 'Wishing you a happy holidays! - From the Tropo Team'

#CC uses Basic Authentication for their API. This code sets up a password manager to take care of that for us
passman = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
passman.add_password(None, cc_url, cc_api_key + '%' + cc_username, cc_password)
authhandler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(passman)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(authhandler) urllib2.install_opener(opener)

pagehandle = urllib2.urlopen(cc_url)
data = pagehandle.read()
dom = minidom.parseString(data)
entry_node = dom.getElementsByTagName("entry")
for entry in entry_node:
	id = entry.getElementsByTagName("id")
	id = id[0].firstChild.nodeValue
	pagehandle = urllib2.urlopen(cc_url + '/' + id.rsplit('/', 1)[1])
	data = pagehandle.read()
	dom = minidom.parseString(data)
	contact_node = dom.getElementsByTagName("Contact")
	for contact in contact_node:
		phone_num = contact.getElementsByTagName("HomePhone")
		phone_num = phone_num[0].firstChild.nodeValue
		url = TROPO_URL + '&numberToDial=' + phone_num + '&msg=' + urllib.quote(SMS_MSG)
		page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
		data = page.read()

Questions or comments? Post to our forums or send us an email to support@tropo.com.

©2012 The Tropo Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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