Category Archives: Telephony

Fonolo Consumer Service Rebranded As DeepDial.com

I just wanted to post a quick note about the Fonolo Consumer service. After much internal discussion, we’ve decided to rebrand and simplify the consumer offering, and move the service to a new domain – deepdial.com.

We did this to reduce confusion with the Fonolo Enterprise product, which has become the primary focus of our company.

We’re also streamlining and simplifying the service. At deepdial.com you’ll be able to “Deep Dial” to hundreds of companies (bypassing their dreaded phone menus) as before. Now, you’ll be able to do that without having to log in. We’ve heard from users that creating an account (and remembering another password) was a barrier to using the service, so we’re removing that barrier!

Accessing Google Speech API / Chrome 11

I’ve posted an updated version of this article here, using the new full-duplex streaming API.

Just yesterday, Google pushed version 11 of their Chrome browser into beta, and along with it, one really interesting new feature- support for the HTML5 speech input API. This means that you’ll be able to talk to your computer, and Chrome will be able to interpret it. This feature has been available for awhile on Android devices, so many of you will already be used to it, and welcome the new feature.

If you’re running Chrome version 11, you can test out the new speech capabilities by going to their simple test page on the html5rocks.com site:

http://slides.html5rocks.com/#speech-input

Genius! but how does it work? I started digging around in the Chromium source code, to find out if the speech recognition is implemented as a library built into Chrome, or, if it sends the audio back to Google to process- I know I’ve seen the Sphynx libraries in the Android build, but I was sure the latter was the case- the speech recognition was really good, and that’s really hard to do without really good language models- not something you’d be able to build into a browser.

I found the files I was looking for in the chromium source repo:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/content/browser/speech/

It looks like the audio is collected from the mic, and then passed via an HTTPS POST to a Google web service, which responds with a JSON object with the results. Looking through their audio encoder code, it looks like the audio can be either FLAC or Speex– but it looks like it’s some sort of specially modified version of Speex- I’m not sure what it is, but it just didn’t look quite right.

If that’s the case, there should be no reason why I can’t just POST something to it myself?

The URL listed in speech_recognition_request.cc is:

https://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/recognize

So a quick few lines of PERL (or PHP or just use wget on the command line):

#!/usr/bin/perl

require LWP::UserAgent;

my $url = "https://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/recognize?xjerr=1&client=chromium&lang=en-US";
my $audio = "";

open(FILE, "<" . $ARGV[0]);
while(<FILE>)
{
    $audio .= $_;
}
close(FILE);

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

my $response = $ua->post($url, Content_Type => "audio/x-flac; rate=16000", Content => $audio);
if ($response->is_success)
{
    print $response->content;
}

1;

This quick PERL script uses LWP::UserAgent to POST the binary audio from my audio clip; I recorded a quick wav file, and then converted it to FLAC on the command line (see SoX for more info)

To run it, just do:

[root@prague mike]# ./speech i_like_pickles.flac

The response is pretty straight forward JSON:

{
    "status": 0,
    "id": "b3447b5d98c5653e0067f35b32c0a8ca-1",
    "hypotheses": [
    {
        "utterance": "i like pickles",
        "confidence": 0.9012539
    },
    {
        "utterance": "i like pickle"
    }]
}

I’m not sure if Google is intending this to be a public, usable web service API, but it works- and has all sorts of possibilities!

Automatic Dial Resource Fail-over in Asterisk

Asterisk is generally pretty reliable, but termination providers aren’t always so good; in a market where anybody can re-sell an upstream provider, or setup a few Asterisk boxes and start routing calls for people, it’s generally a good idea to have a “backup” provider (or three) to route your calls through.

You can easily setup an Asterisk system, to fail-over to secondary systems, if your primary provider fails for some reason- and this can all be done right in the dial plan, using a simple MACRO.

Add this MACRO to your dial plan:

[macro-direct-dial]
exten => s,1,Set(CALL_ATTEMPT=1)
exten => s,2,Set(TERM_PROVIDER=${TERM_PROVIDER1})
exten => s,3,Dial(${TERM_PROVIDER}/${ARG1},60)
exten => s,4,GotoIf($["${CALL_ATTEMPT}" >= "${MAX_PROVIDERS}"]?s-CANCEL,1)
exten => s,5,Set(CALL_ATTEMPT=$[${CALL_ATTEMPT} + 1])
exten => s,6,Goto(s-${DIALSTATUS},1)

exten => s-BUSY,1,Noop()
exten => s-NOANSWER,1,Noop()
exten => s-CANCEL,1,Hangup()
exten => s-HANGUP,1,Hangup()

exten => s-CHANUNAVAIL,1,Set(TERM_PROVIDER=${EVAL(${TERM_PROVIDER${CALL_ATTEMPT}})})
exten => s-CHANUNAVAIL,2,Goto(s,3)

exten => s-CONGESTION,1,Set(TERM_PROVIDER=${EVAL(${TERM_PROVIDER${CALL_ATTEMPT}})})
exten => s-CONGESTION,2,Goto(s,3)

Now you’ll need to route your calls into this MACRO; this can vary by dial plan, as you may have a special configuration for different area codes, or country codes, or based on some least-cost-routing business decisions, but a simple example would be something like this:

[default]
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Answer()
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,2,Macro(direct-dial,${EXTEN})
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,3,Hangup()

This routes any NANPA numbers through the direct-dial MACRO above, passing in the phone number as the first argument to the MACRO.

Now, before this will work, you’ll need to configure some variables; this can be done in many places- in my working configuration, I have these variables dynamically generated via an AGI script, based on the phone number being dialed. This way I can control dial-groups, by phone number, based on a cost/preference/etc.

In this example, we’ll simply set these values in the globals section of the extensions.conf file:

[globals]
TERM_PROVIDER1 = SIP/first_provider
TERM_PROVIDER2 = IAX/second_provider
TERM_PROVIDER3 = SIP/last_provider
MAX_PROVIDERS = 3

So I’ve configured three fictitious termination providers; you can specify as many as you like, as long as the TERM_PROVIDER increments one for each, and you set the MAX_PROVIDERS value to the total number of providers listed.

This is obviously more useful if this list is automatically generated somehow, or changed based on the phone number being dialed, otherwise the retries could simply be hard-coded into the dial plan.

Now when you dial your number, it will start with the first (default) provider; if the dial() function returns a congestion or channel un-available error, the MACRO will cycle to the next provider, until it as gone through all of the providers listed.

Fonolo iPhone App In The News

We’ve received a tremendous amount of press coverage in the week since we launched the Fonolo iPhone application, including a quick spot on the ABC News tech bytes segment.

It was also featured on:

lifehacker- Fonolo Skips Automated Customer Service Phone Trees, Now on iPhone

TMCnet.com – Fonolo Launches Free iPhone App

CNet – Fonolo’s deep dialer comes to the iPhone

Techvibes – Fonolo lets iPhone users skip corporate phone hell

and many other sites.

We couldn’t be happier!

Stay tuned for some upcoming additions.

Fonolo Widget – Deep Dialing For Your Business

Fonolo for business lets you embed your companies phone menu (IVR system) right on your website, or in your mobile applications, with just a few simple lines of HTML code.

Fonolo automatically maps out your phone system (and stays up-to-date with any changes you make)- You will get happier customers, fewer misdirected calls, and better feedback from your callers. Best of all, you do not have to change anything in your existing phone system.

Here’s a really simple example for our fake “Fonolo Airlines” company:

More details about Fonolo for business can be found here. We’re running several live trial runs with a handful of companies- if you’re interested in getting access to the Fonolo widget, contact us.