App Profile: TurnoutMachine dares people to vote on election day (and calls with a reminder)
April 17th, 2008 by Dan YorkOne of the challenges we have in giving away voice application development services is that for the most part we don’t really know what exactly people do with our platform! If they become a commercial hosted customer, we obviously learn about their application but if it’s done with our premise Prophecy platform, or even a free account on our Evolution portal, we don’t usually know what people are using us for unless they (or someone) tell us or it turns up in one of our searches.
So we were intrigued to learn via a blog post back in March that a developer has launched the “Turnout Machine” using Ruby on Rails and our platform. The blog post has more details, but here’s the piece on the application screen:
- Dare your friends to vote and see if they chicken out.
- We’ll send your friends a txt or give them a phone call on election day reminding them of their promise to vote.
The developer indicates that this is his experiment in looking at “how peer-to-peer connections might be leveraged to create action”. He goes on to talk about the technical side:
The application was written using Ruby on Rails and is hosted on a Joyent Accelerator. The interesting bits from a technical perspective are the txt messaging and telephony support. To send out txt messages I am using Clickatell - an SMS aggregator and service provider. I had never interfaced with their service before, but it turns out there is a gem for Ruby that made it insanely simple. To send out phone calls I had considered using Asterisk, but instead decided on using Voxeo’s hosted VoiceXML platform. This made it easy to get the service up and running quickly without having to think very much about telephony infrastructure. It will also let me do speech recognition if the need ever arises.
It’s great to see he’s using Ruby on Rails to interact with our platform and personally being very interested in all things political I do wish him all the best with his experiment. I do hope he’ll write up how it all worked out for him. (Of course, it sounds like our part (calling people with reminders) doesn’t kick in until the actual Election Day this coming November.) Again, the blog post has more details if you would like to learn more.
Do you have a cool application you have developed using our platform (hosted or premise)? If so, please do drop me a note and let me know. We’re looking to profile more applications here on this blog in the future.
P.S. We don’t know the developer of this application and as the blog post was unsigned we can only guess his name from the About page. If you do choose to actually participate in his Turnout Machine application, it is at your own risk. We just thought it was worth writing about as a cool use of our platform.
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ruby, rubyonrails, voxeo, voicexml, applications, politics
Tags: Applications, Voxeo
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April 18th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I will be teaching a course at SpeechTek on CCXML, and at the course I will teach people how to use the Voxeo platform to *block* election-year unsolicited phone calls.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Moshe, sounds like a great course… I’ll be at SpeechTek, too, and perhaps I’ll have to come by and check it out! Do note that with this gent’s app mentioned here, you are requesting that the application call *you* to remind you. So in this particular case, you are doing this to yourself through accepting the call request.
However, I think there’s a great number of folks out there who would love to have the app you are are helping people to write!