Ring Ding Buzz →

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

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