Using telemessage to generate a phone call from Rev

[Richard Miller]

I did get this sorted out, but the result wasn't what I expected. I am 
now waiting for telemessage to give me a bit more credit to fully check 
the solution. But I think it will work fine and easily. I could post the 
full solution here, if anyone wants to see it. Using this routine, it is 
very easy to turn any text into a voice-based phone call through Rev... 
at 10 cents per call (which is not a problem for my application).

What I had to do was kind of "reverse engineer" the process. I took 
their test form (which generated a call perfectly when I inserted my 
username, password and recipient phone number) and used the html from 
that form to create a new form which then sent the output to my own Rev 
cgi program. I grabbed the output from that post, so I could see what 
their form was generating. I then compared that data to what I had been 
generating earlier through my Rev telemessage test post. There was a lot 
of differences between the two, which was confusing, since I would have 
thought (based on their documentation) that it was only a matter of 
setting the right httpheader and sending a post to their server.

Once I had the output generated from their form, it was simple to 
replace the variables with Rev variables, set the httpheaders to empty, 
then generate the proper post. As I said, I haven't quite been able to 
fully test it (because I need two cents of additional credit from them.. 
which I hope to get this morning), but I suspect it will work fine 
because when I send the post now and check the result, it comes back 
with a full message saying, I don't have enough credit to place the 
call! Before, it just gave me error messages.

So thanks, Kay, for this suggestion. I think this will be an elegant 
solution. It'll be interesting to play with the message content to get 
some variations which produce a quality text-to-speech message.

Richard