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Laravel News:
Building an Interactive Voice Response System with Laravel and Nexmo
Apr 26, 2017 @ 14:37:45

On the Laravel News site there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to create a simple iVR system with Laravel and Nexmo that includes voice responses.

Want to dial your Laravel app, and have it talk back to you? Let’s take a quick look at how to build a really simple IVR (interactive voice response) – a ‘phone menu’ – with Laravel and Nexmo. When it’s done, you’ll be able to pick up your cell phone, dial a phone number, and have your Laravel app control what you hear.

It’s probably easier than you think, let’s get started!

Using a standard Laravel application and a Laradoc environment, they pull in the nexmo/laravel to connect with the Nexmo service. They also add two others to add additional functionality for reading Tweets and RSS feeds. After configuring the application providers to pull in the Nexmo and Twitter functionality they go over to the Nexmo site and create the application they'll use. The tutorial then shows how to generate a command (the AppCreate command), its signature and the code to make the Nexmo API request. They then create another command to link the application to numbers on the Nexmo account.

Finally, they get to the "good" part - creating the code to handle the incoming calls over webhooks. This includes the controller, routes and - based on user input - how the IVR will respond. In their example, when the number is called, the latest tweet from @taylorotwell is fetched and is converted to text, then spoken back to the caller.

tagged: tutorial ivr voice response system laravel nexmo api

Link: https://laravel-news.com/laravel-hotline-ivr

SitePoint PHP Blog:
Voice controlled PHP apps with API.ai
Aug 31, 2015 @ 14:36:14

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to help your applications understand natural language with the help of the Api.ai service.

In this tutorial we’ll be looking into Api.ai, an API that lets us build apps which understand natural language, much like Siri. It can accept either text or speech as input, which it then parses and returns a JSON string that can be interpreted by the code that we write.

They start by explaining some of the concepts you'll need to know in using the service: agents, entities, intents, contexts, aliases and domains (each with a summary and examples). In their example, they show how to get the current time from any given places using their API. He shows you how to set up a free account and create a new agent. He then uses Guzzle (the HTTP client library) to make the request to the API with your API and subscription keys. They show the result of a query for "What's the current time in Barcelona Spain?" and how to extract the "location" value from the results. With this they then search the Google API for the local time of "Barcelona Spain". With the time in hand, they then use the responsive-voice.js library to convert the text to speech at the click of a button.

With all these concepts under your belt, they also walk you through a second application, a currency converter. It uses the same workflow as the previous example with the exception of using the CurrencyLayer.com API to perform the financial conversion. All code needed for this example is included as well. If you'd like to just jump to the end, they've also shared the complete code for both examples over on Github.

tagged: voice control api apiai tutorial localtime currency convert

Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/voice-controlled-php-apps-with-api-ai/

Voices of the ElePHPant:
Interview with Laura Beth Denker
Mar 06, 2012 @ 18:42:42

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest episode - an interview with Laura Beth Denker of Etsy.

Cal's "three questions" for her were:

  • What's your title, what it means and what do you do? ("Anthropologist of Developer Culture")
  • Can you talk about the toolset Etsy uses for continuous integration?
  • Can you discuss private methods and why you like them?

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 directly or by subscribing to their feed.

tagged: voice elephpant podcast interview community member laurabethdenker

Link:

Marcelo Gornstein's Blog:
Unit test your PHP IVR applications with PAGI
Mar 01, 2012 @ 19:25:49

Marcelo Gornstein has a recent post to his blog about a method he's come up with to test your PHP-based IVR ("interactive voice response" systems for telephony) applications with the help of PAGI.

Since version 1.9.2, PAGI comes with a mock of a pagi client, suitable to be used in your own unit tests, so you can test your telephony applications, like IVRs. The idea behind the mocked client is to let you test the callflow side of your application, the user interaction and the exact sequence an ivr application should obey. Let's see how to use it.

He shows how to test a basic PAGI application by hooking in the PAGI client into his PHPUnit test for the app and the code coverage of the result. The MockedClientImpl client lets you test the application without having the external dependency of actually running it. He includes some examples of commands and how they'd be mocked out with this client as well as a handy list of the "on*" methods available (like "onDial" or "onSayAlpha").

You can find the complete source for everything in the article on his github account.

tagged: unittest ivr telephony voice pagi mock client

Link:

Voices of the ElePHPant:
Interview with Luke Stokes
Feb 28, 2012 @ 20:16:31

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode - an interview with Luke Stokes, a co-founder of FoxyCart.

Cal's "three questions" for Luke were:

  • Why did you choose PHP to build the Foxycart platform?
  • What did you learn in the process of becoming PCI certified?
  • What lessons do you have for people looking to put together a platform and an API?

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

tagged: voice elephpant podcast interview community member lukestokes

Link:

Voices of the ElePHPant:
Interview with Chris Shiflett
Feb 16, 2012 @ 16:16:40

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest episode, an interview with Chris Shiflett (as recorded in 2011).

In the interview they talk about things like:

  • Chris' security experience
  • The PHP community's shifting focus on security
  • What's the biggest security mistake PHP developers still make?
  • Cross-site request forgeries
  • Chris' current work with Mapalong

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can also subscribe to their feed to get the latest.

tagged: voice elephpant podcast interview community member chrisshiflett

Link:

Voices of the ElePHPant:
Interview with Elizabeth Naramore
Feb 07, 2012 @ 14:16:18

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest episode (one recorded a while back) - an interview with Elizabeth Naramore, a well-known PHP community member.

This episode was recorded in 2011. Elizabeth now works for Orchestra.io. It’s still a fun interview though because...well, it’s Elizabeth.

You can find her blog here and follow her on Twitter here. If you'd like to listen to this latest episode, you can either listen in-page or download the mp3 directly.

tagged: voice elephpant podcast interview community member elizabethnaramore

Link:

PHPBuilder.com:
Create PHP Voice Recognition Apps on the Cheap
Jan 18, 2012 @ 15:49:14

On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has a new tutorial showing how to create voice recognition applications with PHP and the help of open source voice interpretation tools.

Voice recognition or speech recognition technology is not easy to develop. In-house development would be very costly, and buying proprietary libraries that convert voice to text would make the developed application very expensive for end users. On the other hand, when developing in PHP, you have many open-source solutions available. The same dilemma happens with voice recognition in PHP -- there is an open-source class that can be used in voice applications. That way your application would cost less, and you also can offer it for free.

His tool of choice is Voice PHP, an open source project that uses four classes with support for SSML, SRGS, CCXML and VoiceXML. In his sample application he shows how to use the libraries to generate an application that can listen to a user's voice and translate that into certain menu options.

tagged: voice recognition application tutorial phpvoice phpvxml

Link:

Voices of the ElePHPant:
Interview with Sean Coates
Jul 28, 2011 @ 15:09:13

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted it's latest episode - an interview with Sean Coates (of Gimmie Bar).

Cal asks Sean his three questions about various projects and topics he's involved with:

  • Can you talk to us about what you see about the process of how PHP is developed and is this a positive or a negative?
  • Can you give us a quick synopsis of why Gimmie Bar moved from CouchDb to MongoDb and are you still confident that it was the right decision?
  • Can you talk a bit about your experience with Node.js?

You can listen to this episode either using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3

tagged: voice elephpant podcast interview community member seancoates

Link:

Voices of the ElePHPant:
Interview with Derick Rethans
Jul 26, 2011 @ 15:53:24

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest episode - an interview with Derick Rethans, the author of the popular PHP debugger XDebug and a core contributor to the PHP project.

Cal's questions mainly revolve around Derick's contributions the PHP core (and one on OpenStreetMap):

  • Do you consider the current way PHP is developed functional or broken (and why)?
  • What would you do to change the way PHP is developed and why would you want to do it that way?
  • Explain to us what OpenStreetMap and why you think this is an important project.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

tagged: voice elephpant podcast interview community member derickrethans

Link:


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