The Tropo Blog

Meet Tropo at CloudCamp Vancouver

Adam Kalsey — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:07:32 +0000

Tropo will be at Cloud Camp Vancouver this Saturday talking cloud communications APIs. We’re sponsoring the event and Adam Kalsey will be there, participating in sessions and showing off Tropo’s services for voice, IM, and SMS in the cloud.

If you’re in the Vancouver area and interested in cloud computing, come on by this free event.

What will you do at Cloud Camp? You will learn how to take advantage of cloud computing to do things you could not do before, to save money, to be more flexible and agile. You can get your questions answered about security, privacy, and compliance. You can learn about and understand the differences between public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid clouds. Hear from your peers who are building and developing on the cloud about how they have stopped buying and installing and maintaining physical servers.

CloudCamp is a free full-day “unconference” where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing.

Details and free registration on the CloudCamp site.

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Does your cloud provider offer SIP for full interop?

Jose de Castro — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:32:13 +0000

What is SIP and why do I care?

Tropo sits in Voxeo’s live communications cloud; an environment specifically designed for real-time voice, instant messaging and SMS applications. On the voice side, a key feature of the Tropo platform is its extensive support for SIP. The Session Initiation Protocol is a Voice over IP (VoIP) technology enabling two ends of a conversation (or session) to negotiate media formats much like the Accepts/Content-Type header does for HTTP.

As a voice provider, SIP is the best way to guarantee seamless interoperability between existing phone systems, carriers and call centers. Not having SIP is like playing Call of Duty on a 15” with no HDMI. Sure it technically works…. but why?!?

Read on for real world example.

In this example, Acme Flowers has an Asterisk based phone system that rings two sales people (Bob and Alice) when a call comes in on 555-1212. Before integrating with Tropo, the phone system would simply drop the caller into voicemail if no one was available.

Tropo FTW! With a couple tweaks, callers are now automatically transferred to a voice-driven menu in the Tropo cloud, providing them with driving directions, order status and store hours all over the Internet, all with industry leading speech synthesis and speech recognition. No extra phone line. No additional telco charges. On top of that, customers get all the same services via SMS and IM using the same exact code!

SIP allows Tropo applications to seamlessly integrate with existing phone systems and call centers over the Internet; cutting the telco out entirely!

Enabled on every app!

Tropo assigns a personal SIP address for every application. This special address is accessible from any modern phone system or SIP-enabled device. You can also use a soft phone like SJPhone for Mac/PC or iSIP / fring for the iPhone.

Give it a try now by calling my demo app at sip:9991429776@sip.tropo.com

SIP Headers

Ever been asked for your account information 20 times only to be transferred to a live person who has no idea who you are or why you’re calling? The problem lies in that most phone systems are a black box, blindly sending calls from one department to another. SIP solves this problem by allowing phone systems to exchange information in between hops.   SIP borrows many concepts from HTTP; one of which is the concept of a header. When SIP endpoints communicate, they send key/value pairs that help route the call. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could leverage this pipeline to communicate non-telephony data? With Tropo, you certainly can.   Tropo exposes SIP headers to your application on every incoming call allowing your application to easily integrate with other systems.

Roger Ebert’s new voice

Adam Kalsey — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:28:28 +0000

Text to speech engines have long been used to allow those who cannot talk to communicate verbally. Film critic Roger Ebert, who lost his lower jaw and his voice to cancer, has taken it a step further by creating a TTS voice that sounds like him.

Using the hundreds of hours of archived film clips from his reviews and other TV appearances, Ebert’s voice was reconstructed by Scotland’s CereProc, a developer of text to speech technology.

Debuting his new voice on Tuesday on Oprah, Ebert said, “You’ll know it’s a computer, but one that sounds like me. It still needs improvement but at least it sounds like me. In first grade they said I talked too much, and now I still can.”

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Create an Audio, SMS and Instant Message Resume with Tropo Scripting

Jason Goecke — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:03:54 +0000

Getting noticed in the job market today gives you an edge. One edge is to create an audio resume that you may give out to show your developer prowess. Using the Tropo multi-channel capabilities, you may then allow that resume to interact with your perspective employer via SMS or even Instant Message.

Whats more, using Tropo Scripting you may create this resume and host it on our servers with no need for your own server or sending mark-up back and forth. And, you may do this in Groovy, Javascript, PHP, Python, Ruby or all of them to show off your polyglot skills.

For this example resume we will use a Ruby script hosted on Tropo.com to make John Doe’s background available (also available on Github here):

answer
say "Welcome to John Doe's audio resume."

listening = true
while listening
  result = ask "Please press 1 to hear an overview of John's resume, please press 2 to listen to his most recent experience or press 3 to connect to John and hire him!", { 'attempts' => 3, 'choices' => '1, 2, 3', 'onBadChoice' => lambda { say 'Invalid entry, please try again.' } }

  case result.value
  when '1'
    say 'Adept at managing all aspects of information technology, including ongoing business needs assessment, software development and implementation.'
    sleep 2
  when '2'
    say 'John served as the IT Director at ABC Insurance. John is a direct manager of a team of 6 people charged with delivery of enterprise level projects.'
    sleep 2
  when '3'
    transfer 'tel:+14155551234'
  else
    say 'Thank you for your time, goodbye.'
    listening = false
  end
end

hangup

You may call and listen to John Doe’s on 1 (408) 940-5947. To get started writing your own you may register for a free Tropo developer account, with a free phone number, here.

Tropo Jam Session Recording

Adam Kalsey — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:59:09 +0000

Miss the Tropo Jam Session yesterday? We’ve got the recording up online now. Watch it embedded below, or on our Blip.tv channel.

In this developer jam session, we present the newly released Tropo Web API. Tropo makes it easy for you to quickly add voice, instant messaging (IM), and SMS to your applications, using the programming languages and tools you already know using a web services API and JSON. We cover how the API works as well as provide examples of how to use this in your communications with robust speech recognition, text to speech, transcription, conferencing, instant messaging, and SMS to your applications.

Using the Tropo Web API behind a firewall with Tunnlr

Jason Goecke — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:02:43 +0000

Many times we find ourselves sitting behind networks without the ability to open a TCP port to hack on our web services. This may be at a coffee shop, a corporate network or that guest network you just connected to at your developer meetup. We have a solution for that.

In steps Tunnlr, a great little service by the folks at ElevatedRails. With Tunnlr, you are able to create a reverse SSH tunnel to a port on your computer. While they do have a plug-in for Ruby on Rails, this may be used to redirect traffic to any application running on a port. In this example I will walk you through how to do this using another Ruby web framework, Sinatra.

The first step is to sign-up for a Tunnlr account. You may select a single plan for USD$5 per month, but you get a 90-day free trial with no credit card required at sign-up. Once you have signed-up and verified your account, they will then provide you with a URL to use to access your tunnel. You will also need to provide them with your public SSH key in your account.

Once you have this setup, then you need to create the tunnel from your computer. I created a shell script that I may run each time I want to have a tunnel.

Then, fire up your tunnel in a terminal window.

Now that the hard part is over, write a Sinatra (or any others) app using our Tropo-WebAPI-Ruby gem and run it on the port you specified in your shell script above.

Thats it, now your Tropo WebAPI app is ready to run behind any firewall. Now you may demonstrate Tropo at that next developer meetup!

How-To: Distinguish PSTN, Skype, iNum, and SIP in your Tropo applications

John Dyer — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:40:08 +0000

Here at the secret layers of Tropo Support we often see similar questions raised by our developer base. We pay attention to these trends, since they often indicate that something may be lacking in our documentation. If we do find something is lacking we of course want to address by expanding on concepts or adding additional examples to help shore up our doc sets and help out our developers.

Recently I have started to notice a trend of developers asking how to determine the source of callers dialing into their applications (Skype, PSTN, SIP, or iNum). We’ll since we are often asked this question I figured I would provide a nice example for the ‘class’ =), I do hope this help!

Regards,
John Dyer
Customer Engineer
Voxeo Support

# -----------
# route based on DNIS
# John Dyer
# Voxeo Support
# -----------
log "@"*10 + $currentCall.inspect   # List some headers
log "@"*10  + $currentCall.getHeader("x-voxeo-to")  # log to header

module SipRegex
  def evaluate_sip_header(header) 
    if header =~ /^
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Related posts:
How to call your Tropo.com apps *directly* from Skype
Join the Tropo developer community – via Forums, IRC or Skype
New Sample Tropo App – speech-driven weather forecasts in Ruby

Tropo Jam Session

Adam Kalsey — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:11:01 +0000

Want to learn more about the new Tropo Web API? Then sign up for our upcoming Tropo Jam Session.

Voxeo’s Jam Sessions are live sessions for developers, demonstrating the latest Voxeo technology. You can join our web conference session and watch and listen as Voxeo’s developers talk about how to get the most out of our products.

This month’s Jam Session is on Tropo and the new Web API. Join Tropo’s Jason Goecke and Jose de Castro February 24th at 11am Eastern to get an overview of how Tropo’s Web API works and what you can do with it. In the session, Jose and Jason will show how to add multi-channel communications with robust speech recognition, text to speech, transcription, conferencing, IM, and SMS to your apps using the programming languages and tools you already know. They’ll even be providing examples of how to use this in your own applications.

There’s no cost to attend, but you will need to register in advance so we can send you the call-in details

Free at 12noon US Eastern today? Join a VoIP Users Conf call about Tropo

Dan York — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:31:02 +0000

If you are free today, February 19th, at 12noon US Eastern, please feel free to join in to the weekly “VoIP Users Conference” call where Jason Goecke and I (Dan York) will be discussing what’s new with Tropo. Information here:

http://www.voipusersconference.org/2010/voxeo/

The key info is that you can call in at noon to any of these numbers:

sip:200901@login.zipdx.com
skype:vuc.com
+1 567 252 2286
iNum: +883 5100 123 94882

I listed SIP and Skype first because if you can use them, you will wind up with a wideband audio connection that’s much clearer.

If you are on IRC, you can also join the “#vuc” channel on freenode.net.

If you can’t join us today, the call will be recorded and available for listening later at the same URL as above.

The VUC crowd is always a fun one to chat with so it should be an enjoyable call… talk to (some of) you at noon!

Tutorial – Adding Tropo to Google Wave

Jason Goecke — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:26:56 +0000

There is another great tutorial that Zhao Lu (aka – @zlu) has done, showing how to use Tropo with Google Wave. Zhao takes JRuby, the Rave gem (created by Jason Rush, aka @diminish7) and creating a Google Wave Robot that allows you to create a callable conference in a Wave.

The complete tutorial and code example is available on Github @ http://github.com/zlu/tropo-wave-tutorial. Thanks again to Zhao!