PhoneAndVoiceMashups

From MashupCamp

We discussed the services and APIs now available to add computerized phone interaction to Web, widget and mobile mashups. Here are some quick (and not necessarily organized) notes:

• Phones are great because everybody has a phone, most people have them with them all the time, phones are easy for everybody to use (especially voice, but also pressing keys on the phone), and they record great vocal audio.

• Having a computer take a phone call and interact with the user (by playing audio and reacting to either voice and/or keypresses) is called Interactive Voice Response, or IVR

• Web APIs available:

- MyVox:  free, ad-supported API for incorporating voice recording and other interactions from the phone into any app that can speak to the API
- Cepstral:  pay-for text-to-speech API (doesn't have to incorporate the phone at all)
- Evoca and Ifbyphone:  like MyVox, but pay-for services, may offer capabilities that MyVox does not
- Voxbone:  phone number procurement API
- Loki:  location-based services API; free, requires browser plugin install
- Simplewire:  pay-for SMS sending and receipt
- Clickatel:  ditto

• For those ready to deploy their own hardware:

- Asterisk (potentially with Open VXI to run VoiceXML)
- OpenSER for SIP management

• For those who are up for writing VoiceXML, but not hardware deployment:

- Voxeo:  VoiceXML gateway and host
- Qwest:  ditto

• In-Call Advertising: This is how MyVox monetizes itself. A mix of types of ads and media:

- Branding
- Click to hear more
- Click to get a text message
- Click to transfer to a call center
- Etc.

• In-Call Ads can be incorporated into almost any automated phone system through its APIs. Phone system owners ("publishers") have a Web interface to monitor ads, screen out what they do or don't want, and even run their own ads on the system.

• MyVox's API is a simple, RESTful API, returning JSON or XML (your choice). It's based around this kind of interaction:

- creating a VoiceRecorder (a phone system app)
- creating RecordingLists (essentially arrays of Recordings)
- adding Recordings to those lists (a Recording is a container for audio to be recorded on the phone)
- creating a RecordingSession when it's time to record the audio, getting a phone number and PIN in response
- pinging the VoiceRecorder for the status of the call as the user calls in audio
- retrieving the resultant .mp3 or .wav files and making use of them in your larger application.

Developer tools and a gallery of sample MyVox-enabled apps are at http://www.myvox.com. There's a $25K developer challenge running right now for the best app incorporating the API.