I am attending the Clue Con Telephony Developer Conference in Chicago today and tomorrow. This is a great show for getting into the technical nitty-gritty of emerging telephony technology. Tomorrow, I will be giving a presentation here on 3 exciting new developments with Fonolo …
1) An API
It has always been on our roadmap to release an API (application programming interface) for Fonolo. We decided to accelerate its release in order to capitalize on the excitement and interest that Fonolo has generated in the community, in particular with carriers and mobile developers.
Today’s release is focused on Deep Dialing. It exposes functionality that lets you
• Search Fonolo’s directory of companies;
• Display the full text of the phone menu for a selected company;
• Initiate a Deep Dial process to any node in the phone menu;
(If you’re wondering what Deep Dialing is, read this.)
2) A developer program
To go along with the API, we announced a developer program. Because the API allows you to place phone calls, we have to put some safeguards around its use. So we set up a form at developer.fonolo.com that lets you request a developer account. Each account has a unique key that will help us track usage.
3) SIP support
We now allow you to route calls to any SIP address, as well as any North American PSTN number. At the moment, SIP routing is only available through the API, not the web interface.
The API does not include access to any account-based info such as call history, call recordings, personal bookmarks or call notes. That’s coming in a later release. (For technically minded, the API is based on JSON-RPC requests over HTTPS.)
You can read the full press release here.
I think it’s great that Fonolo has opened their technology up to the public with an API. I like what they have to offer & I know that I’m not alone. Leveraging Voice APIs to save yourself time & money just makes sense. I hope their technology is refined enough to keep up with the ever changing IVR menus that are out there. Assuming their API is simple & the technology works this sounds like an awesome application to integrate into existing applications.