The Huffduffer Hotline
After seeing (and hearing) what Brian was doing at History Hack Day, I decided I’d have to have a play with Tropo. Like Twilio, it’s a service that allows you to build voice-activated apps that you call up and talk to.
The API is pretty straightforward and it seems like there’s quite a lot that you can do as a developer before upgrading to a paid account. They’ll also host your code for you, and you have a choice of scripting languages.
At the most basic level, you can send text-to-voice messages:
say("Hello world")
But you can also give it audio files to play:
say(http://example.com/helloworld.mp3)
Huffduffer has the locations of thousands of audio files, so I thought a voice interface onto Huffduffer’s collection would be fun.
Call +1 202 600 8751 in the US, +44 2035 142722 in the UK, or use Skype. When the nice digital man on the other end picks up the phone and asks you want you want to hear, you can respond with “what’s new”, “what’s popular”, or say a tag like music, science, history, politics, technology, etc.
The script then fetches the latest files with that tag and will go through them with you one by one, asking “Would you like to hear… ?” followed by the title. If you don’t like the sound of it, just say no. When you find something you do want to hear, say yes. It will then start playing and you will be listening to a podcast down a telephone line.
I call it the Huffduffer Hotline. The code is on Github. If you fancy playing around with the Tropo API and want to use Huffduffer’s links to audio files, go ahead. You should find everything you need through the Huffduffer API.
If people find the Huffduffer Hotline useful or just plain fun, I’ll upgrade from the developer account to get better performance. Let me know your thoughts on Get Satisfaction.