Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The world is abuzz this morning that the minor demons of the recording industry have kissed Steve Job’s ring, agreeing to scrap DRM on iTunes downloads.  As Michael Geist said: “this decision continues to shift away from the failed strategy of locks and levies, though the industry is still vigorously promoting anti-circumvention laws to protect the very locks that are becoming less and less relevant”.

So when will our own government admit that the copyright “reforms” they are proposing are outmoded, and no longer required?

Okay.  It’s confession time. 

When I wrote 2008: The Year that VoIP died I had an ulterior motive.  Although I hadn’t done Jeff Pulver’s analysis and learned that VoIP Buzz is down 46.5% during 2008, like many people I felt in my bones. I don’t think VoIP is dead.  I do think the excitement has gone out of it.  Perhaps that’s because of the economic climate, or perhaps that’s because it’s not as newsworthy as it once was.  In any case, it was time to ignite a conversation about the future of communications again.  Being an argumentative SOB, I did it by taking an extreme – some would say indefensible – position. It’s a time honoured tactic practiced by Silicon Valley’s best, Scoble and Arrington.

Personally, I was pleased to see the huge number of people participate.  Most of all, I was excited to see Jeff Pulver engaged in a conversation about the voice industry again.  He’s a smart guy, and his presence has been missed.

So what shall we talk about next?

I confess that I gave TringMe’s new offering, VoicePHP, a quick once over last week, and didn’t spend nearly enough time with it.  Perhaps it was the pitch that included the line “Everything else remains the same in PHP except that echo, print now speaks!”.  Nevertheless, I had a closer look at it this morning.  VoicePHP looks like it might be the answer for those looking to create a quick and dirty voice app using a familiar programming language.

VoicePHP is an implementation of PHP that allows voice input to be captured, and voice output to be played back to a user.  Accessed via a telephone, it would be well suited to creating applications that are traditionally built with IVR systems.  The big advantage is that using VoicePHP to write a voice app is no different from writing any other kind of PHP application, and that means that millions of programmers already know how to do it.  TringMe has also added some specialized APIs for call control, text messaging, and a few other telephony specific functions.  For PHP programmers these shouldn’t be a stretch. 

Thumbs up!  This is another welcome addition to the lexicon of programming languages that can now be used to create voice applications.