Tropo Launches Hypervoice Assistant Ito
Tropo, a provider of real-time communication (RTC) developer platforms, has released Ito, a communications assistant or bot for the Slack chat communications tool. The Ito bot adds voice and video features, including person-to-person calling, multiparty conferencing, call recording, voice-to-text transcription, and voice analytics to text messaging platforms.
Tropo provides a cloud communications platform commonly described as communications as a service (CaaS). Tropo allows users to develop and deploy real-time voice, video, and messaging apps using APIs.
Ito leverages the Tropo.com hosted RTC service as well as the Tropo Phono WebRTC and Flash client to connect users via regular phones or Web browsers.
"If you have a Slack chat open with 10 colleagues and decide you need to bring five of them into a conference call, there was no easy way to do that in Slack. Now with Ito, you just type a simple command, Ito dials the appropriate phones and creates your conference on the fly," said Michael Søndergaard, councilor of coding at Forged Alliance Forever, in a statement.
Ito ican also perform advanced voice analytics or hypervoice, on calls, and can record, transcribe, index, and analyze multiparty conversations. Tropo is a founding member of the Hypervoice Consortium, backed by industry leaders including Ericsson and Telefonica.
"Modern voice conversations are, by default, initiated and received on powerful computing devices. However, these communications remain shackled to the legacy patterns and constraints of telephony; Ito's support for Hypervoice changes that," said Jason Goecke, CEO and president of Tropo and founding contributor to the Hypervoice Consortium.
Tropo Labs plans to integrate Ito with additional platforms such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and HipChat later this year. Ito is available via an invitation-based beta.
“Ito is yet another example of the power and flexibility of Tropo. When just a couple of developers working in their off time can pull off a powerful integration like this, you know you’ve built a company around a solid API,” said Jonathan Taylor, chairman of Tropo and Entrenext Ventures, in a statement.