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• Listen to your Emails – Part I
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• Voice Twitter – Access your tweets over phone – Part I
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• Voice RSS – Let your blog speak – Part I
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• Hello world! – First VoicePHP Application

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Voice RSS – Let your blog speak – Part I January 19, 2009

How often have you thought that it would be a cool idea to hear your favorite RSS feeds? If you are a blogger or a webmaster, wouldn’t it be a nice addition to have your blogs be spoken to the reader?

Well, think no more. Code below shows a simple implementation of an Voice RSS Reader.
Here are the key steps of this application:

• Specify the URL for the RSS feeds you are interested in.
• Ask the user to select a feed by pressing the appropriate keys on the keypad
• Fetch the RSS feeds using a helper function
• Speak the title of the feeds and if user is interested, the description of that feed

This example demonstrates advanced usage of the prompt API. In particular, check out:

• Usage of timeout to control the duration within which a user input is requested.
• Usage of barge_in to specify if the user can interrupt the prompt being played.
• Finally, a simple way to specify dtmf grammar of expecting a single digit dtmf input

Enjoy the simplicity of VoicePHP. In Part II, we will enhance this application using ASR (automatic speech recognition).

<?php
include_once ("rssutils.php");

// Feed Provider Name & URL (Below list in alphabetical order)
$rss = array (
    array('Giga Om', 'http://feedproxy.google.com/ommalik'),
    array('New York Times', 'http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Americas.xml'),
    array('Plugged In', 'http://feedproxy.google.com/pluggd'),
    array('Read Write Web', 'http://feeds2.feedburner.com/readwriteweb'),
    array('Tech Crunch', 'http://feedproxy.google.com/TechCrunch'),
    array('USA Today', 'http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/usatoday-NewsTopStories')
    );

$feedcount = count($rss);

$prompttext = '';
for($i = 1; $i <= $feedcount; $i++) 
    $prompttext .= "press $i to hear news from {$rss[$i-1][0]}, ";

$prompttext .= 'press 0 to exit';
echo "Welcome to the Voice PHP demo of voice RSS reader.";
$choice = '';
$loop_count = 3;
while($loop_count) {
    setvoiceoption("voicetype", 'female');
    $choice = prompt($prompttext, 1, 3, "dtmf:1");
    
    if($choice == '0') 
        break;

    if($choice > $feedcount) {
        echo "Invalid choice, try again";
        $loop_count--;
        continue;
    }
    

    speak_rss($rss[$choice-1][0], $rss[$choice-1][1]);
    break;
}

echo "Thank you for trying out Voice PHP demo.";

function speak_rss ($name, $url) {
    // Get RSS feeds from the selected feed using a helper function
    if (false == get_rss($url, 5, 512, &$result)) {    
        return;
    }
    $loop_count = 3;
    while($loop_count) {
        setvoiceoption("voicetype", 'female');
        echo("Reading news title from $name now. At any time, 
              press 1 to get details on the news, 
              press 0 to exit.");
                
        for($count=0; $count < count($result); $count++) {

            $choice = '';
            $voicetype = ($count&1)?"female":"male";
            setvoiceoption("voicetype", $voicetype);
            
            $choice = prompt($result[$count]['title'], 1, 1, "dtmf:1");

            if($choice == '1') 
                $choice = prompt($result[$count]['description'], 1, 1, "dtmf:1");
                
            if($choice == '0') 
                return;                
        }                
        sleep(1);
        $loop_count--;
    }            
} // End of function speak_rss

?>


Download source code

Try It Now!

Click the button below or call +15672449192 to run the application.