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

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