I need to add a functionality to my java-based web application that will allow users to click on a link and the application will automatically call the user and another party and connect them in a phone call.
Does anybody know what would this entail?
Thanks
It can be done with Twilio, and their new, easy Conferencing API. Trust me, it's really really simple. Another option might be CloudVox, but I haven't (formally) tried their service yet.
The World-Wide Web Consortium has an integrated set of speech interaction standards that you'll find interesting. There's a markup language called VoiceXML that is analogous to HTML in that web applications generate it. It differs from HTML in that it's specialized for temporally-based speech interactions instead of visual interactions. So instead of looking at a screen you listen to audio prompts and computer-generated speech. Instead of typing and mousing, you speak back and what you say is processed by a speech recognizer or recorded.
There are many companies using VoiceXML to automate voice response systems, and they handle billions of calls per year. You've probably talked to them many times without realizing it. One of the best companies in this space is Voxeo, and they have a developer site at http://evolution.voxeo.com/ that you can play with. Evolution lets you call your web application over an ordinary phone (or Skype). You actually talk to a VoiceXML-based web browser which will fetch a VoiceXML page from your Java application server, "play" it to you, listen to what you say, and then report that back to your app via a form submission, get the next page to render to you, etc.
Another related standard is CCXML, or Call Control XML. You use this to create teleconferences that may or may not include a voice response application.
So it sounds like in your case you want your standard web application to talk to a CCXML server and ask it establish call legs to the web user and to a customer service line. I know that Voxeo Evolution offers CCXML as well.
There are other good companies in this space too. One that comes to mind is TellMe, which was bought by Microsoft a year or two ago. These two companies (and others) offer professional services too.
So I wanted to write this up as an answer to the comment above. The Skype API provides a number of options for telephony in COM, Java and Python:
Skype4Java - https://developer.skype.com/wiki/Java_API
Skype4Py - https://developer.skype.com/wiki/Skype4Py
Skype4COM - https://developer.skype.com/Docs/Skype4COM
They provide a communication and command protocol layer for working with Skype, more info on the API here:
https://developer.skype.com/Docs/ApiDoc/Overview_of_the_Skype_API
It's kind of different for every platform, the Linux version is based on DBus or X11.
Try FreeSWITCH. I have done this before. Its pretty straight forward. Can be a bit hairy when you need to log call accounting and all those stuff. I hopefully would be able to provide you some guidelines and code samples, let me get home first. Cheers.
The good thing in using FreeSWITCH, you will be able to handle multiple calls, and quite a number of. You might need that in future.
Note: You have to use some kind of VoIP provider in order to do that. I was using Gizmo5 that time and it was pretty good.
Sorry buddy, lost the servlet code somewhere. But no worries it was a simple servlet. Fortunately, I had added my example Java code for XML-RPC, into the FreeSWITCH wiki, and actually that was the code my servlet was invoking down the road. Below is the snippet.
XmlRpcClientConfigImpl config = new XmlRpcClientConfigImpl();
XmlRpcClient client = new XmlRpcClient();
try {
config.setServerURL(new URL("http://localhost:8080/RPC2"));
config.setBasicUserName("freeswitch");
config.setBasicPassword("works");
client.setConfig(config);
// For external phone calls using VoIP. We will use something like below.
// new Object[]{"originate", "sofia/gateway/gizmo1/6098989898 &bridge(sofia/gateway/gizmo9/0116054545454)"}
// gizmo1, and gizmo9 are the accounts configured under freeswitch gateway configuration.
client.execute("freeswitch.api", new Object[]{"originate", "sofia/internal/1001 &park()"});
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
Moreover, you need to configure few things prior doing this. You need to set up the gateway using your VoIP provider settings.
For FreeSWITCH related help, take a look at this SO Thread.
I know of 2 API providers that does what you need:
1) twilio - can connect to 2 or more parties using TwiML (their markup). example
2) Hoiio - very easy to use with 1 line of RESTful api call. example
Related
How can I make an online server to access API's and handle requests? Then how can I have my android app access this online server to make requests?
I have an android app that I am building for a school project. This app will need to use multiple APIs to gather information to display to the user. However I don't want to allow people to decompile to source code and take my API keys. My plan is to build an online application that will do all of this work on the server side. This way the user only submits a query and the server sends information in response to their request. This will speed things up for the user and keep the keys from being accessed by other individuals.
Steps I think I need to take.
Set up server to access the API's
Make app access online server through HTTP requests
3....
4...
I have a very general concept in my head, but I'm not sure where to begin. If I'm wrong on any part of this question please correct me.
I do plan on moving this to the app store in the future.
edit: Do you know of tutorials that show the building of the API and then loading it to Amazon AWS or another server?
There are many options when building restful services for api consumption. You could start with php, which is the easiest to start with. Here is a nice tutorial that takes you through the initial stage all the way to the end of building login system for android using mysql and php as the server language. It contains the barebone details of setting up the infrastructure and logic. I think from there you manipulate and go further.
https://www.androidhive.info/2012/01/android-login-and-registration-with-php-mysql-and-sqlite/
check out java rest easy, it is a nice tool to use to build web API's. You can host it for cheap at red shift or amazon using their pay what you use billing.
The cheapest way for you to host your REST API is to use Amazon's API Gateway. You pay for what you use and pay nothing if it is not being used. API Gateway plays very nicely with Amazon's Lambda service that allows you to run discrete code units - again, you only pay for what you use. Lambda itself plays nicely with Amazon's pay-as-you go NoSQL datastores (SimpleDB and DynamoDB).
I have my application running on AWS on tomcat instance with Java code with mongodb database.
I now need to integrate this with Facebook messenger ChatBot and wit.ai.
I am really struggling to get started, some sample code i have found but in different languages.
Can i run this and integrate with my portal running on Tomcat. it should call both Facebook messenger and wit api.
I need to get high level idea as to how to proceed.
To connect wit.ai to your facebook page, you just need to create an accound with wit.ai, and then create a new application (or use the default starting one).
Then you can go to the settings of the app, and you will se the Server Access Token code.
You need to paste that server access code in the field "Integrated NLP", that you will find in your Facebook for Developers account, then access the application that you want to use NLP, in the setting for Messenger. For that you must have the messenger app already created and configured with it's webhook wich I guess you have.
Once that's done, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) will be sent to your server automatically as another field in the message. And it's preety simple to understand and train from wit.ai
The messages of the user will be analyzed by wit.ai, and if it finds any entity of the default ones or one defined by you training the bot from wit.ai, will send it to messenger, and this one will insert the NLP in the message.
So you will recive a normal JSON message from messenger, with an extra field called NLP that will contain something like the following example:
"text":"reservar una pista","nlp":{"entities":{"tipo_cita":[{"confidence":0.98398202482107,"value":"pista","_entity":"tipo_cita"}]},"detected_locales":[{"locale":"es_XX","confidence":0.9935}]}}}]
My chatbot is in spanish, but there's an example of how you can see the NLP in the JSON message.
I introduced the text: "reservar una pista"
And it recognized the value: "pista" with a confidence of 0.9839. Wit also detected the language "es_XX" that's spanish with a confidence of 0.9935.
First of all think about what your bot should do. What functionality will it provide, which questions will be asked by users and how you would like to respond to that.
If you have a general idea about your problem space you can start thinking about the technical challenges.
Be aware that both the Messenger Platform and wit.ai are completely independent products and they provide an HTTP interface to their service. That means you can use any language you like to interact with these platforms. Your application acts as the middleman to these services.
Start off establishing an integration with the Messenger Platform so you that you are able to both receive and send messages.
For that you have to create a Facebook page which acts as the identity of your product. Users will find you in Messenger by your pages' name. You also need to create a Facebook app where you subscribe to your page and specify the webhook settings so that messages are relayed to your own backend service.
The documentation for this is really good and I advise you read it carefully. You can find it here.
After going through the docs you will have a good understanding of what you can do with the Messenger Platform and which types of messages you can send and receive.
Once your able to send and receive messages you can start to extract some sense out of them. For this you can use wit.ai, but there are also other services you might consider. E.g Google just released their own NLP platform which provides similar features. See here
Also there is api.ai
In general you have to send received messages to the service of your liking and get back structured information about what the intent of the user is and what values where extracted. With that information you can act accordingly.
If you want to stick with wit.ai go through their Getting Started guide and recipes section. That enabled me to use their platform.
I hope this gives you a general idea about how an integration could work. This is fairly high-level and much of the details (especially on the NLP side) depend on your specific use cases.
You can use a sample nodejs implementation of witai and facebook messenger from their official repo. First of all, you have to train the model of witai to understand expressions and extract entities. Then set up the messenger bot on fb and attach it to some fb page. Once you are able to get the messages from the webhook callback send them to the witai API. You will also have to define actions in your code for the witai to execute actions defined in the model.
I am going to develop uber-like application.Here I have to send latitude and longitude to web and mobile devices continuously with my service,What I have do to get this.
Can anyone please give some idea.
You should start by designing how the application is to be used, seen from all the different users perspectives.
For instance is this a web app, or a native app, or both?
Then from that knowledge, you need to define a communication protocol.
You should be able to determine if the client will be polling for data, or if you need to push it from the server onto the clients.
This also goes for the data that travels the other way.
From here you choose a language for programming, and then start doing some proof of concept tests.
The choice will depend on the chosen underlying technologies
(web / native / os / available libraries)
After some test work you may have something that works, then you need to review or add security to the communication, cause we do not want everyone collecting location data from everyone that has the app installed.
Then run beta trials and eliminate the worst bugs, and then release the app.
You'll want some sort of asynchronous task which can get new data from your server and refresh the mobile and web content to reflect the content of the server. You'll also want to notify the server whenever you make local changes to content and want to reflect those changes. Android provides the SyncAdapter pattern as a way to easily solve this pattern. You'll need to register user accounts, and then Android will perform lots of magic for you, and allow you to automatically sync. Here's a good tutorial: http://www.c99.org/2010/01/23/writing-an-android-sync-provider-part-1/
Well, I'm kinda new to mobile app development, but I have a fair amount of experience with Java. I stumbled upon CodeNameOne and thought I'd try to make an app based on "It's Learning". Unfortunately this site won't let me get straight to the logon page without going through the main portal first. So here's my question:
Is there any way (in CodeNameOne) to automate navigation on the web in the background and get information from the site, such as login and the newsfeed, then send data from the app and to the web page?
(Something like the way HtmlUnit works is what I'm looking for)
You can do some of that work using ConnectionRequest to simulate user interaction but that would probably be fragile as Andrew mentioned. The main issue is that they might change the site structure and your HtmlUnit code would break.
What we do when faced with such a situation is create a server that abstracts the "scraping" behind a set of clearly defined REST API's. That way if the site design changes we just update the server to match the change and all the clients out there will work as usual without requiring an update.
Naturally there is always a possibility of the site blocking you or even blocking your server IP address/range so Andrews advice of actually talking to the guys is sound advice.
Now, I have some problems here:
I looked several times in Google and so on, but I can't find an "easy" way to get this done. And currently having a migraine... not helping me... though
I have a java eclipse program (Swing application to be a "controller" for production-machines).
I need to design an Android app, which needs to take data from the eclipse program in a wireless network (and also send them back).
Just found solutions like JPARSON or setting up a real server, but that is way too complicated... i don´t need?! (or want :D ) to set up a whole website with php or something...
Can someone of you help me out with a better solution? It doesn't need to be code-specific, I just want to exchange like 10 strings for these machines.
If you want to exchange data you need a communication medium. The easiest way to do this is via TCP/IP protocol suite. If you decide on having a Server-Client architecture, your serwer has to listen for what phones have to say. He can do this by listening on specified port and you would have to handle "protocol", or you can use somewhat easier approach which is to write php script, or Java Servlet. PHP script is easier becaouse there is like a gazzilion php hosting providers and it's cheap. If you would like to write your own serwer, you wold need some sort of Virtual Private Server, and deploy your app there. Plus it would be helpfull if you explained a little more your environment and what you are trying to achive.
There's built in httpserver http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/jre/api/net/httpserver/spec/index.html so you can easily implement a simple webservice in standalone java. Then just use URLConnection from android to post/get data, probably in json or your own format.