marks / ohana-sms

A project to create an SMS interface for the Ohana API, powered by Tropo

ohana-sms

A project to create an SMS interface for the Ohana API. SMS, Voice, and SIP support through Tropo, web app hosted on Heroku. A civic hacking project to give back to the community by @Skram of Social Health Insights.

Demonstration

Service	Number/Name	Voice/Text
Call/SMS	[phone]	Both
SIP	sip:[e-mail]	Voice only

Data Source

This app uses data from the Ohana API.

• HTTP API Documentation at http://ohanapi.herokuapp.com/api/docs
• This app uses the Ruby library at https://github.com/codeforamerica/ohanakapa-ruby/

Screenshots and Voice Recordings

A recording of a voice session

Current Limitations

• User is only prompted for a location and only a 5-digit zip code is acceptable.
• User is not asked for what kind of service they are looking for. "food" is hardcoded in.
  • It is easy to ask SMS users what "kind" they are looking for or even let them include free text queries. This is not the case for phone users. We can say "press or say 1 for food, 2 for shelter, etc.." or use voice recognition for a set vocabulary but then we must explain the available words, etc.
• User can only select from the first 9 search results

TODO

• Add information for contributing to this repo (it's very much welcomed)
• Add screenshots and/or recordings to demo functionality

Steps to recreate

1. You will need to have Ruby, Rubygems, Heroku and Git installed first.

2. Drop into your command line and run the following commands:

• git clone http://github.com/marks/ohana-sms.git --depth 1
• cd ohana-sms

3. Edit the config.yml to use suit your preferences and make sure following ENV are set (Google Analytics ones and are optional):

  OHANA_API_KEY=your_api_key
  GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_DOMAIN=yourdomain.com
  GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=UA-XXXXXXXX-XX

4. Back at the command line, issue:

• heroku create
• git push heroku master

5. Log in or sign up for Tropo and create a new WebAPI application. For the App URL, enter in your Heroku app's URL and append /index.json to the end of it.

6. That's it! Call in, use, and tinker with your app!