Real-time Ann Arbor Parking Availability By Phone

Real-time Ann Arbor Parking Availability By Phone

Patrick and Fred in Ann Arbor Michigan came up with a neat little voice application for checking parking space availability by phone.

“The parking garages in Ann Arbor provide nice signs in front displaying
in brightly lit numbers, the amount of available spaces remaining. Ann
Arbor also posts this information on the web at the A2DDA
website. An idea came to mind that basically, you can tell the
available spots either from the website or right when you reach the
garage — but what if you wanted to know while driving to the garage?”

They built a version using Asterisk, Cepstral, and Perl so we had to try using Twilio.  30 minutes later we had working Twilio version! Try it out here: 734-399-4328

Want to try building something similar yourself?  Here is the source code:
http://monkey.org/~phy/a2parking/a2parking.py
http://monkey.org/~phy/a2parking/locations.xml
http://monkey.org/~phy/a2parking/spots.xml
http://monkey.org/~phy/a2parking/error.xml

And it’s all hosted on Google App Engine for free!