CallFlow Designer

I’ve uploaded a new version of a.Net CallFlow Designer to the CodePlex site.

This app is available both in binary form, and in source code form; you can take it, modify it, and if you make changes that you think should be commited and shared with others, please let us know through the portal at http://web21c.bt.com

While this is written in .Net (for the 2.0 runtime), it’s a tool that will help you use the CallFlow service regardless of which of the current SDKs, (Java, PHP, Python, .Net) you use. So all you need is a reasonably up to date Windows OS. Sorry to all those who just have Mac’s or *.nix installations.

It will help you to manage any audio provisioned to the service, and, in the future, when you can map inbound numbers to CallFlow XML scripts, then there are features to help you manage that feature too.

There’s also been a pain point that folk have identified in getting audio into the right format for use over the telephone network; there is assistance in the tool to help you convert mp3 files to a suitable format, though you will need to download lame.exe and sox.exe as well.

Schema validation has been extended to support the new Text to Speech features in CallFlow, and other minor changes to the service.

I hope you find this useful.

CallFlow – now with TTS

There’s been some excitment in the office recently, reminisent of spending time in my high school Spanish classes looking up words in the dictionary I probably shouldn’t have been looking up. This excitment is about the latest CallFlow feature, text to speech.

Adding text to speech to your CallFlow app couldn’t be easier, simply adding a <text> element to either an <announcement> or <prompt> parent will read out your text. It really couldn’t be easier, but we went a little bit further than that, adding different voices and language support and also going someway to support Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

There is a lot of really interesting potential uses for this feature, and I’m looking forward to hearing about how people are using it.

Communications as a Service

SIP stacks, PSTN gateways, media servers, SER gateways, XML gateways, PKI and more.  It’s all fun stuff (honest), but there’s a lot there.  One of the reasons why you may be reading this is that you’ve thought about adding some voice or messaging features to an existing application but neither have the time, nor patience to learn how to plug all of this stuff together to make a few phones ring.  That’s where we come in.

Making phones ring is what we do, and is quite a powerful thing to achieve from code.  You’ll have to take my word that the team got quite excited about playing calling phones, playing announcements and other fun stuff when this all started, and also when new features are introduced. 

That leaves me with my final point:  What we’re trying to provide is communication as a service.  A hosted service ‘in the cloud’ that does cool stuff with phones. 

Moving on, we’d really like to hear from you, particularly if you’ve used our services in an innovate way, or our services have helped you solved a business problem, please do get in touch.

- Robbie