Author Archives: mike

Fonolo Launches Call Recording Feature

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We’ve been hard at work here at fonolo, and we’re happy to announce the availability of several new features, including the ability to add custom bookmarks, an improved company search bar, and probably the most exciting, the ability to record your calls, and then play them back through the web interface.

 

Bookmarks:fonolo_bookmarks
The bookmarks feature lets you personalize a list of companies, and points in a companies’ phone tree, that you call frequently. Entries in your bookmarks list can then be deep-dialed with a single click.

 

Improved Search:
We’ve added a much improved search bar at the top of every page inside the interface. The new search will provide an auto-complete drop-down as you type, with searches that can be based on partial/full company names, partial/full phone numbers, as well as keywords found within the companies phone tree.

 

Call Recording:

One of the most exciting new features, is the ability to record your phone calls directly through the fonolo web portal. While you’re on a call initiated through the fonolo portal, simply hit the “Start Recording” button, and fonolo will start recording your phone call for you.

fonolo_recording

After you’ve completed your call, the recording will appear in your history (available from the home page, or from the company page); you can then playback the recording online, or download and play it back locally through your favorite mp3 player (like winamp or windows media player).

This is a beta release of call recording; enhanced features will be included in our next major release.

Visit the fonolo website to sign up today, and come see Shai Berger in person at the 2009 Emerging Communications Conference.

VoicePHP by TringMe

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TringMe, an Indian start-up just released its new VoicePHP service, which allows you to develop voice applications using PHP.

This is definitely cool stuff, though I see quite a few issues with implementation. HTTP, is, by design, a non-persistent transaction, and a phone call requires persistency while the call is in progress; therefore, there is no way for PHP alone, to handle “Voice” requests.

The only way to really make this work, is to have an external server (effectively a PBX of some kind) that handles the call traffic, that is simply polled (in some fashion) by PHP on a per request basis. Those requests could be polled via Ajax, or even a comet-like system, but it’s still not handled directly via PHP. I assume this is where their VoicePHP “Server” comes in.

voicephparch

So, in this sense, it sounds simply like a PHP wrapper around the TringMe REST API, which is something that can already be done in other ways, like accessing the Asterisk Manager interface via PHP using asterisk-php-api, but with one interesting twist-

It looks like (according to their FAQ) you can access the audio streams directly from PHP- which is pretty interesting, depending on how they’ve implemented it. Given the (generally) short transaction lengths of an HTTP request, I’m not sure how you would realistically pull audio from a real-time source (like a phone call), or play-back an audio clip on to a call, unless you used some sort of scheduling system.

ie- use PHP to decode and audio file (say .wav or .mp3), and then send the file to the VoicePHP server, which schedules the audio clip for playback, and returned immediately. It’s then played over the call in “real-time”. PHP could then poll the VoicePHP server to get status about the playback.

I’ve signed up for a beta account to play around with it, hopefully I’ll see something from them soon.

SIP Softphone for iPhone

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I’ve been using an iPhone for quite sometime now- I bought one just before the 3G’s came out- I was going to wait, but I figured I’d be able to pickup a first gen pretty cheap with the 3G’s coming out, and I wanted to get an unlocked one anyway, as I didn’t want to end up getting stuck with the Rogers plans/term contract.siax

I just installed a new app the other day, that gives you a native SIP/IAX2 client for your iPhone- which is pretty awesome, and something I’ve been waiting (and considering writing) for a while now. It’s called SiAX, and currently only available through Cydia (jailbroken phones).

The app works fairly well- the audio quality is good, and seems to be pretty solid. Unfortunately, you only seem to be able to receive calls through the app while you have the application running; it doesn’t maintain any SIP registration information when you close the app, which is a little weird. But for a quick call here and there, especially to avoid roaming charges on the road, it’s pretty decent.

I’ve actually disabled my data plan with Rogers, as it’s a rare occasion that I’m not around a wifi connection- even when I’m travelling, there’s usually at least one Starbucks around. Of course, this was only after incurring hundreds of dollars in roaming data usage.