Look at my friend Jonathan's company, VOXEO.  Unless you're going
to run out and build a platform that executes Voice XML code and
can support IMAP etc. then the easiest way to do this is to
leverage VOXEO's service.  You can start building on it for free
and you will pay > $0.10 per minute for the pleasure of
using/testing the service.
http://www.voxeo.com
If you have about $50K to throw at the project then you can look at
NUANCE, which has a platform that combines VoiceXML/VXML, Speech
Reco, and the L&H speech synthesize, which will allow you to have
your email read to you by Stephen Hawking.
TellMe & BeVocal have off-the-shelf services that do this, though,
but from my testing, they suck.
If I were to build this I'd spec a lightweight IMAP client and
VoiceXML browser and dump them on VOXEO.
However, you'll find this to be extremely slow and frustrating.
Better to us a screen phone with a WAP client.
-Ian.
On Wednesday, July 17, 2002, at 09:53 PM, Mr. FoRK wrote:
> I was talking to a friend today about voice applications - using a
> phone to
> get mail or info (other things are possible, but that's what we talked
> about).
> He's running a mail server called X-Mail (or something) and it has
> a Web UI
> written with some PHP pages. I made the comment that rending an inbox
> listing with VoxML (or whatever the latest thing is) would be
> trivial & with
> a little playing around you could do a simple voice app to
> monitor & admin
> the mail server, or you could actually get/send mail this way.
>
> The hard part is hooking up to the phone system - how do I get a
> phone to
> hit a 'voice app server' that hits the HTTP+VOX enabled mail server?
> He'd want to give this back as open source, but there is no
> corresponding
> open source voice server - or is there?
>
> I've looked at BeVocal - it seems that Talk2 is toast - does
> anybody know
> how else this could be done?
>
> I'd love to see a digital answering machine with some speech
> recognition
> built-in that would proxy into a personal computer for contact
> lists & mail
> & whatnot. I could call /my/ home phone and bounce out to the web or do
> whatever, without needing a publicly available voice server.
>
>
> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork