Phono - JQuery plugin to create a phone in your browser | Hacker News Reader

Phono - JQuery plugin to create a phone in your browser

phono.com

60 pointsakalsey30 comments

Does it work? I tried calling my landline and my mobile and it says "Answered, Hangup", though I don't see anything on the landline/mobile.

Sorry xtacy, try again! Finishing samples at 3am the morning of launch is not a good idea ; )

Are you calling a US number? The site says that free calls are only supported to US numbers.

That explains why I also got "Answered, Hangup" with my UK landline even though the phone certainly didn't right.

Might be good if the in-page demo mentioned the limited (US-only) aspect as it wasn't obvious to me that it didn't work with my UK number.

My mobile Rogers Canada number worked as well

It worked for my Canadian cell number.

"If you're developing from a local file system (i.e. not a web server) you'll need to edit your Flash security settings. Select "Edit locations" > "Add location" > "Browse for folder" and select the the folder that contains your HTML files."

'nuff said...

Nuff said about what? Yes, this has a dependency on Flash (soon to be on Java instead optionally) but so does EVERYTHING that interacts with video or audio devices on the host operating system. This is why Google Talk, Voice in Gmail, etc require the google a/v plugin to be installed, and it's the same reason that this requires Flash.

If you don't like it, go lobby the <device> in HTML5 committee.

Aside from the cool plugin, the site design is great.

Agreed, very slick. The only part that I think is confusing is the inclusion of a 1/4" jack in the logo. I think of guitars and headphones and not telephones when I see that, which moves me further away to the meaning of "phono" that the site needs to convey.

I worry that doing something like this entirely client-side may make it easily abused. =/

I don't see any pricing info. Are you re-selling Voxeo's services or do I pay them directly? They don't seem to want to give out pricing either.

How about a ballpark estimate of what it might cost to actually use this in production?

For now, Phono works with a Voxeo backend (either the enterprise stuff or Tropo, the cloud telephony API). The intent is to allow a developer to create their own backend platform that works with Phono. We'll release the spec for that once the API has settled in and we're sure there's no significant changes needed.

Tropo's pricing is at http://tropo.com/pricing/ and start at 3 cents per minute. Voxeo's other products are based on amount and type of usage and you'd want to contact our sales guys to get a quote. sales@voxeo.com should work for that.

What's up with the latest posts claiming JQuery plugins when they aren't. It's using Flash.

Javascript can't capture the user's microphone directly. So Phono uses a tiny Flash or Java widget to do that part. The rest is all JS.

We're heading an HTML 5 working group on voice in the browser, and once HTML5 has mic support, Phono will use it.

Any guess as to when the <device> element (or api - Berjon vs Hixie?) will be adopted by a shipping browser so we can have this all-js microphone (and camera) access without a flash shim?

My bet is Android webkit first (ericcson closed source webkit proof of concept already exists); a timeline would be nice though.

Any implementation right now would be pretty early. The live media capture parts of HTML5 aren't fully-speced out yet.

http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/camera/

With any luck, some browsers will form a defacto standard that solves the outstanding questions long before the HTML5 group finishes.

Furthermore, what exactly is the point of making it a jQuery plugin?

"Phono is a simple JQuery plugin and JavaScript SDK [...]"

It's using Flash but it's still a jQuery plugin. Perhaps incomplete but not inaccurate.

Claiming it's a "simple JQuery plugin" is disingenuous at best. The critical component is Flash. JQuery is merely the wrapper around it. Without Flash, the JavaScript is worthless, and the application cannot work.

I called myself and I could talk on my phone and hear it in the browser, but there was no audio picked up on my laptop mic to go back to the phone. I'm assuming it's still being worked on - interesting execution though!

We fixed an issue this morning where sometimes the Flash microphone permission window wasn't showing up. Try it again and it should work for you.

The Phono guys were great in helping me integrate this on http://pitchpower.appspot.com. There was a small bug on their side & they fixed it in a few hours.

I don't really have time to continue develop pitchpower right now, but I couldn't resist integrating Phono when I saw the announcement here. All in all took less than an hour, so worth it. Back to real work now.

I tested it with my GV US number and it is working very well. Great job. Too bad it doesn't work on iPad because of the flash applet. (Java wouldn'd help either) But that's nothing you can do something about.

Does this have a flash dependency?

We use a tiny Flash movie to capture the microphone, since Javascript can't do that part. We'll be adding an option for a Java applet later, and once HTML5 has microphone support, we'll get that in there, too.

Yes

The demo doesn't appear to work for international numbers (I'm assuming this is in the US, I'm in the UK (+44)). Not to say this isn't impressive.

Amazingly cool.

Thanks! Let us know if you use Phono for anything. Would love to see what you come up with.

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