Fonolo Exposes Deep Dialing APIs, Adds SIP Support

Fonolo, the company that allows you to cut through the interactive voice respones mazes companies put up, has exposed this “deep dialing” functionality in an API. The API allows you to:

• Search Fonolo’s directory of companies;
• Display the full text of the phone menu for a selected company;
• Initiate a Deep Dial process to any node in the phone menu;

I don’t get it. I can see how cool Fonolo’s technology is and I can see why making it available to others might be a good thing. But I’m trying to figure out how this would fit into another application. Not at the nuts and bolts level, but at the 50,000 foot level. Maybe I’m lacking imagination here.

One other thing that Fonolo did that I can see the value of immediately–at least for Fonolo–is the ability to route “deep dialed” calls to an arbitrary SIP address. This presents a cost savings for Fonolo and for the end user, a bit more flexibility about where deep dialed calls go.