Indian Startup Intros ‘VoicePHP’

Attempting to bring simplicity and universality to Web-enabled voice applications, an Indian startup has announced a new programming language known as “VoicePHP.”

Actually, it’s not new, according to TringMe, founded by Lucent and Texas Instruments (TXN) vet Yusuf Motiwala in Bangalore, India in 2007. It’s just a voice-enabled version of the familiar Web programming language PHP (which stands for “PHP: Hypertext Processor”). It’s not an extension to PHP, TringMe writes on its Web site, “in fact it’s the same PHP which now outputs voice instead of text and also takes input as voice instead of text.”

TringMe is hoping that VoicePHP will serve as a more powerful, flexible, and easy to use language for voice-Web mashups than VoiceXML, which to date has been the most widely used tool for creating such applications. It will also be going up against Ribbit, now owned by BT (BT), which “is betting on the large-scale adoption of Flash and hopes its Flash-centric solution would become the engine that powers web-voice applications,” writes GigaOm’s Om Malik.