Mark Silverberg

It lets you put a full featured phone on your blog/website. Get the code and instructions at the GitHub repo above.

Be sure to check out http://blogs.voxeo.com/ for a mention of it too!

A screencast I created showing off a mashup of unified communications (Tropo) and an API for finding volunteer opportunities (allforgood.org). Tropo is a communications API provider that makes it dead simple to integrate any application with the voice/phone, SMS, instant messaging, and Twitter networks.

• Additional documentation on the application nuts and bolts.
• Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions

Problem: You’re at a foreign restaurant and your dining partner asks what “gruyere” is. OK, good; your time to shine.  You inform them it’s a hard yellow cheese from cow’s milk. Swell. They think that dish sounds good… but ask you to pronounce the word for them. You don’t want to make a fool of yourself with the wrong French accent so you google “gruyere” and Wikipedia is the first result:[ɡʁyjɛʁ] and /ɡrɨˈjɛər/ … not too helpful.

Enter a voice mashup built with the Tropo Multi-Channel API that consumes data from Forvo, a speaking dictionary of sorts.

Solution: Text message “gruyere” to 202-618-0887 or pronounce@tropo.im

In under 70 lines of Ruby code, I’ve built a Tropo app to accept input via text, call you, play the sound file(s) of user-contributed pronunciations from Forvo, and, while you’re on the phone, text message you back a link to the sound file for future reference if you so choose.

Try it out and check out the open source code and quick start instructions on GitHub - it’s free. Comment, modify, and share it. The code has a lot of comments and if you get stuck, the Tropo developer documentation and other support channels are always helpful. You can also find me, other Tropo enthusiasts, and support engineers on #tropo (Freenode) at all hours.

Some Links: FREE CODE | SMS Screenshot | IM Screenshot
My Website / Let’s Chat

Blog Post: www.projectidealism.com/2010/06/introducing-notifireme.html

Blog Post: www.projectidealism.com/2010/06/introducing-notifireme.html

Transparency Data Tropo Application Slides

Transparency of data has been a huge topic, and rightfully so. The people at Sunlight Foundation created transparencydata.com and while I like their web UI, I wanted a way to look up contributors on the fly. Like, say, with my phone’s built in SMS feature.

Thanks to their open API, I created this tropo.com application that can be queried from an IM, SMS (cellular text message), or Twitter*.  Below are some details. I will no doubt add more functionality in the future, but don’t hesitate to contact with me with on-and-off topic ideas for this.

What does it do?

Send along the state and name of your subject. In this case, we’re looking up who contributed money to a political campaign, committee, or organization. The system will return the amount of public records it could find from the extensive dataset provided by the source (see above) and some pertinent details. More information is always being added and requests are welcome.

Try it for yourself!

Message format**: [2 letter state code] [contributor name***]] 

• Jabber: tdata@tropo.im
• AOL IM: transparencydata
• SMS: (240) 242-7944
• Twitter*: Mention your query to @tropotdata

* - As a result of the way Twitter works, the application is set up to only return the total amount of contributions for your query. For up to 9 specific results, use IM (AIM or Jabber) or SMS. This is in order to not flood Twitter. 

** - Other search criteria. Include any of these words or numbers anywhere after the state code in your text message.

• You can include years to narrow down your results. The year should be the cycle of the political campaign. Use pipes as OR statements. For example, “2006|2007|2008|2009” would return results from campaigns only in 2006-2009.
• You can also search by the seat type.
  • For federal seats, include any of the following words: “senate”, “house”, or ”president” (or “federal” to search all of these, or “senatehouse” to search both senate and house seats)
  • For state seats, include any of the following words: “lower”, “upper”, or ”governor” (or “state” to search all of these, or “lowerupper” to search both lower and upper state seats)

** - You may also include 

*** - Contributor name can be a full name, surname only, or even a company or organization name.

Examples/Screenshots

Have fun looking up yourself, family, coworkers, and love interests!

Much more to come.

Tropo recently announced international language/phone number support, along with Twitter support. In less than 15 lines, you can implement your own Google Translate IM/SMS/Twitter bot. This snippet doesn’t take advantage of Tropo’s international text-to-speech support but you should definitely check it out.

Free code! http://gist.github.com/345179

Try it for yourself.
Message format: [from language] [to language] [text string to translate]

• IM: translate@tropo.im
• SMS: (240) 242-7963
• Twitter: Mention your message to @tropotranslate

Screenshots:

• Twitter
• SMS 

This is my very quick Ruby implementation for PostageApp’s RESTful API. It’s very simple but currently they only publish a Rails plugin. This method I wrote works great with any standalone Ruby app.

Note, if the method returns true, it doesn’t necessarily mean the mail was sent successfully. It will only return false to the API call if you sent the request to a bad URL, your API key is invalid, or something like that.

I hope to add more features to this as they do so, but for now the API is barebones and so is this code.

I’ll try to keep this gist up to date. Works nicely with VoiceXML and Tropo.

Current project sneak peek.

This is a guest post written by me for The Tropo Blog. Tropo (by Voxeo) just released a new interface into their unified communications platform: a JSON/WebAPI with a magnificent ruby gem. I had the pleasure to play with the new magic on the staging server, write some examples, and test functionality.

Contact me or the Tropo support team if you have any questions about Tropo or

Call flow map of application built with Tropo’s new WebAPI. Host code on your own server just like a regular website.

I used Ruby and Sinatra in this example to make my tweets accessible over the phone, IM networks, and through cellular text message.