Indigo-PhoneValet Integration

Posted on
Mon Sep 08, 2008 2:57 pm
jay (support) offline
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Indigo-PhoneValet Integration

All,

After some false starts and some really great work by the guys at Parliant, I'm pleased to announce an integration between Indigo and PhoneValet. This integration does two things:

1) Create some variables in Indigo that represent various information about PhoneValet data (# of new calls, last caller, etc.). You can then use this data in other scripts or actions, or even show the data on your control pages. Image being able to see who the last caller was to your home over the internet, or how many new calls you have waiting without having to call in to PhoneValet!

2) Use the text-to-speech system of your Mac along with PhoneValet to create answering machine functionality. This is particularly useful if you're using Airfoil to direct your sound through a whole-house av system; or, even, to an AppleTV in your living room. Use an Insteon controller (or any type of controller including an IR remote) to control your voicemail from anywhere in the house and use your whole-house audio to listen! Each VM menu as spoken by the system will also time-out after 30 seconds as well, so if you don't take any action the system will shut down automatically.

I've uploaded it to the file library. Note the system requirements:

• Indigo 3.0.3 or later
• PhoneValet Message Center 5.4.2 or later (and, I believe, PhoneValet Home Edition 1.1.2 or later, but that isn't out yet nor is it tested). This version was released by Parliant on 9/8/2008.
Play Sound 1.6.7 or later
• the "iTunes attachment.scpt" file must be active in Indigo (it is on by default in all Indigo installations)

Feel free to dissect the various scripts to see how they work. This is a pretty complex integration, so I've included an installer script that will either do a "clean install" which will delete any previous installation attempts and install OR it will try to fix an integration that's gotten hosed somehow.

Feel free to post any questions here you might have about it.

jay

Posted on
Mon Sep 08, 2008 4:32 pm
dtich offline
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great jay!

i'm gonna try to integrate the variables into my existing setup. this attachment is a bit more integrated than i want to go right now. but it looks fantastic.

do you have a link to dl the latest pv version? i'm on 5.3.2b, but 'check for updates' tells me i am the most recent.

EDIT - nm, found it. support/downloads.html


:)

Posted on
Mon Sep 08, 2008 6:05 pm
dtich offline
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boy, that works brilliantly. so fast, too. thanks jay (and parliant)!

finally. phew.

Posted on
Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:40 pm
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Question: What do you need "Play Sound" for?

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Thu Sep 11, 2008 3:26 pm
jay (support) offline
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Play Sound is used to play the "beep" sound when there are new messages and will actually play the voicemail message if you're using the answering machine functionality. It's very small, uses a tiny bit of memory, and has no UI, so it's really unobtrusive. And it plays just about every type of sound file that you can imagine. I didn't want to use iTunes because I'd have to add the sounds/voicemails to the library which is just a waste (IMHO).

It's also fully interruptable (so you can stop it playing at any point): I'm not using that functionality currently, but probably will at some point.

If you don't use the answering machine functionality and you have turned off the alert sound (PhoneValet_shouldPlaySoundAlert set to "false") then it shouldn't have to be present.

jay

Posted on
Thu Sep 11, 2008 4:57 pm
Skiddy offline
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jay wrote:
Play Sound is used to play the "beep" sound when there are new messages and will actually play the voicemail message if you're using the answering machine functionality. It's very small, uses a tiny bit of memory, and has no UI, so it's really unobtrusive. And it plays just about every type of sound file that you can imagine. I didn't want to use iTunes because I'd have to add the sounds/voicemails to the library which is just a waste (IMHO).

It's also fully interruptable (so you can stop it playing at any point): I'm not using that functionality currently, but probably will at some point.

If you don't use the answering machine functionality and you have turned off the alert sound (PhoneValet_shouldPlaySoundAlert set to "false") then it shouldn't have to be present.

jay


I'm maybe missing something here but if you're using Airfoil to distribute the message to your speakers and that's set to play system audio, wouldn't it play the "beep" anyway???

Posted on
Thu Sep 11, 2008 5:50 pm
jay (support) offline
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If not Play Sound, what would play the beep then? Something has to play it.

jay

Posted on
Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:47 pm
Skiddy offline
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jay wrote:
If not Play Sound, what would play the beep then? Something has to play it.

jay


See, I told you I was missing something... I didn't read your post closely enough :oops:

Posted on
Sun Sep 21, 2008 8:43 am
JeffS offline
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Installation setup help

Jay-

I was going through your installation documentation, and under the "Installation" section you specify that you need to "add the PhoneValet Background Script.scpt to a startup trigger action.", and that you "believe there is, by default, a trigger that already runs several scripts at startup. You can just add this script to that trigger." I can't seem to find this trigger, and am not sure how to create a "startup" trigger. I'll admit that this is the first "fancy" thing I am trying to do with Indigo, so I apologize if I am asking the obvious.

Thanks in advance for your support, and for addressing PhoneValet integration.

Take care!

Jeff

Posted on
Sun Sep 21, 2008 3:16 pm
jay (support) offline
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Hey Jeff,

When you're looking at tthe Trigger Actions list, you might see a triger that has a Trigger Type of "startup" (second column). You can just add another action to that one. If not, that's OK, you can just make a new one:

1) Click the "New" button
2) In the dialog that shows up, select "Indigo Server Startup" as the trigger type
3) Select the Actions tab and then select "Execute AppleScript"
4) Select the radio button beside "File:" then click the "Choose" button to select the "PhoneValet Background Script.scpt" file.

That's it - the next time the server starts up, the background script will be active. You can start it up without restarting the server by clicking the "Run" button after step #4.

Let me know how it's going. Before you do this, though, download the library again from the filelib. I fixed a last minute bug that kept the answering machine functionality from deleting (just uploaded the fix like 5 minutes ago). :oops:

Another thing on my todo list: add dates (and versions?) to the filelib so people can check to see if they have the latest.

jay

Posted on
Tue Sep 23, 2008 8:01 am
JeffS offline
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Jay-

Thanks, I've got things to go a little further, but...

I made the change suggested in the PhoneValet Bacground Script.scpt to reference "Macintosh HD:System:Ligrary:Sounds:Ping.aiff", but was not getting any sound (yes I've installed the Play Sound application - although I'm not quite sure how to make it start at login like a regular app, but if I go into Activity Monitor right now it shows it as running). When I went back into the script editor and ran the script from there I get the following AppleScript error:

TextEdit got an error: alias "Macintosh HD:System:Library:Sounds:Ping.aiff" doesn’t understand the «event µSNDplay» message.

The symbol before the SNDplay seems suspect, but that is what was in the script from the downloaded package.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again, and take care!

Jeff

Posted on
Tue Sep 23, 2008 9:41 am
jay (support) offline
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It looks as if the script is trying to tell the application TextEdit to play the sound rather than telling the application "Play Sound". Make sure that the tell statement is in fact:

tell application "Play Sound" to ...

This line is close to the bottom of the script. Also, in your post, the file name string has a typo ("Ligrary") - make sure that it a typo in the post here and not in the script itself.

Note - you don't have to change the sound file line since you want it to play the system Ping sound. The file definition in that script as it ships always finds the system Ping sound, so you only need it if you want to play some other sound. So, you might just want to use the script as downloaded to get it working before you change anything.

One last thing: you might want to double-click on the Play Sound application once - when you download an app from the internet, 10.5 likes to throw up that dialog telling you that you're about to start an application that was downloaded. I'm not sure what would happen if the first launch of Play Sound came from a script call...

jay

Posted on
Tue Sep 23, 2008 11:33 am
JeffS offline
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Background Script issue

Jay-

Thank you very much for your support!

I looked at the original file, and sure enough I must have had something highlighted in the script editor, and then somehow got it to replace it with code referencing TextEdit. I copied the original back in and it works fine.

Now I'll play around with the actual indigo variables and see what trouble I can get into...

Thanks for taking PhoneValet under your wing, I think this is great!

Jeff

Posted on
Tue Sep 23, 2008 6:28 pm
Skiddy offline
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Jay,

I'm looking at this using the "Home Edition". I've installed everything as suggested, configured as suggested but it's just not working for me. The script installed into Phone Valet gets the following error when I try to run it in the script editor "stand alone":

PhoneValet Home Edition got an error: Can’t get every «class PVCl» whose «class CLst» = 1.

I'm not sure if the other scripts (in Indigo) can be tested standalone either.

Any thoughts on suggested fixes.... and how can I do a clean uninstall should I decide not to proceed?

Posted on
Tue Sep 23, 2008 7:23 pm
jay (support) offline
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The last time I checked, Home Edition hadn't been updated to include the new required AppleScript functionality. I'd send Parilant support an email asking when Home will be updated.

They did tell me back during testing that Home Edition would have the same AppleScript functionality that Message Center has, but you'll need to verify with them.

jay

EDIT - I just checked the Parilant website and the Home Edition hasn't been updated since February - so it definitely doesn't have the new AppleScript support. They released Message Center 5.4.2 this month with the required additions.

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