Add phone-capabilities to your apps or sites using TringMe

While Adobe is working on their Pacifica IP phone solution for Flash, Indian company TringMe already has a solution for integrated phone and voice services in your Flash applications. Based around the VoiceXML standard, this beta service could be a nice way to add some new tricks to your apps.

Want to add free voice dailing and messaging to your applications? How about speech recognition or dynamic voice generation? Have a customer that have offices in multiple countries? Now you can offer them something new that'll make them save on the phone bills.

The TringMe service can use traditional land based or mobile phones, Google Talk, Yahoo Voice or Skype as carriers. We have not developed anything using this service ourselves, but we've tried several sample applications and it looks like you can combine any of the above services. Imagine this scenario: you sit on your computer, using a custom made AIR app to call up a co-worker that resides across the atlantic. If the co-worker isn't online, the system can call them up on any of the services (ordinary phones, gTalk, yahoo voice, skype...) and merge the calls. If the coworker does not answer on any service, you could have a voice-mail service as well. Pretty neat?

TringMe offers both pre-made widgets, a Flash API as well as REST APIs to developers. You don't need to know anything about VoIP since the APIs remove the need for this. You can do more than voice as well such as text to speech, sms, IM (jabber, yahoo, msn and skype) as well as speech recognition. Another plus about this technology is that it's TCP based, so it has no issues with firewalls, something that was recently proven when it allowed calls from Aircell’s inflight WiFi service. Combining the voice recognition with text to speech, you can make those super-annoying automated phone services that you talk to (rather than having a real human at the other end).

Check ot these demos for an idea of what you can use this service for. If you have a Twitter account, make sure you check out the Phweet service. Using this, you can easily set up free calls between you and your Twitter friends. The quality is pretty good, especially if you use a headset.

Looks like TringMe beat Adobe to the market on this one? Adobe is still working on their Pacifica VoIP solution. They are holding the cards close on this one and little have been published thus far, but expect to see demos at the Adobe MAX conference.

 

 

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