Make your own TellMe for free

First of all, if you’re not familiar with TellMe, pick up a phone and dial 1-800-555-8355 and interact with it a little.

TellMe Studio, a free, online development environment for creating VoiceXML applications, allows you to create your own TellMe-like application. It’s been around for a while but this is the first I’ve heard of it.

With TellMe you can make all kinds of voice-activated applications like IVR menu systems, information systems and voice dialers. They host the VoiceXML interpreter and provide SIP access with up to four simultaneous calls. That’s not bad. All you have to do to go live with a voice app is provide a means to gateway calls over SIP to their system. With Asterisk it’s a piece of cake.

It has a fairly rich feature set with Javascript available as a means for more advanced logic than what the VXML can do natively. I just started playing with it recently and quickly got a simple menu system running. Try it out, and leave a comment if you write any interesting code.