[via Audioblog/Mobileblogging News via Smart Mobs]
IndyMedia in Melbourne, Australia, recently announced PIMP, the Phone IndyMedia Patch system, as an automated system for anyone with a telephone to submit live reports to Indymedia. The first use of PIMP was to report on a demonstration. This is exactly what I imagined early on as a great use for PhoneBlogger.
The purpose of PIMP is very similar to PhoneBlogger. Their system is pretty low-tech, but it looks like it should work just fine. Sometimes, the simplest thing that works is best.
They definitely aren’t using VoiceXML, speech recognition, or text to speech. Instead, they’re using a program called vgetty to do much of the heavy lifting. When you call PIMP, you’re actually calling a voice modem. Vgetty is used to save your recording to a wav file. They use SoX and LAME to convert the WAV file to an MP3, similarly to how I used them with PhoneBlogger.
For some people, setting up a voice modem and a couple Linux programs will be easier than setting up a VoiceXML gateway and bridging it to the telephone network. But, with the free hosted VoiceXML services provided by companies like TellMe, BeVocal, and Voxeo in the US, I think the VoiceXML approach ends up being a lot simpler, and definitely a lot more flexible. In countries without free hosted VoiceXML gateways, of course, Indymedia’s approach makes a lot of sense. However, the installation instructions for PIMP are a bit intimidating and somewhat less than clear. But, then again, so are the ones I wrote for PhoneBlogger.
I’m not sure if Hugh is using the same approach as IndyMedia, but he has a service called VoiceMonkey that also essentially acts like a voice mail system that can publish recordings to a website.