Can an iOS app control a phone call?

Question

My Mom's deaf. I typically talk to her using a TTY service and she has a TTY phone at her house. I've looked in to iOS TTY and all it ever says is about connecting a cable to the iPhone to use a physical TTY. TTY uses 50bit per second baud-dot code for communications it should be trival to write a program that generates it on the iPhone. Just a sequence of tones, at a relatively low baud rate. BUT I need to be able to control the phone functionality from an app... Then I could type messages like "txting" and have it send baud dot code to my mom's phone. (I've tried giving her a computer, but she's 86... Old dog... new tricks...)

Any ideas?

Out of curiosity, if she's deaf (not blind), wouldn't normal txting work for sending her typed messages? — cdeszaq, Oct 04 '11 at 14:10
Look into using an SMS-to-TTY gateway or buy your mom a cheap cell phone if you can persuade her to use it. No can do with app. — Robin Summerhill, Oct 04 '11 at 14:18
@cdeszaq:I know, that would be obvious, but *sigh* My Mom and technology don't work too well together. :( Which is very frustrating being a programmer myself. — NoMoreZealots, Oct 04 '11 at 21:24

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 04 '11 at 14:07

5

No, it not possible. The official iPhone SDK does not allow this kind of interaction with the phone.

answered Oct 04 '11 at 14:07

rckoenes

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I was afraid of that... prob a security thing I guess. Bummer. – NoMoreZealots Oct 04 '11 at 21:26

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 04 '11 at 14:24

You can't do this on the phone, but you could try to make a webservice that does it instead. Then have the app connect to the service to deliver the message.

TAPIComm on this page looks like a sample to work from

http://www.tapi.info/default.aspx/TAPI/PSDKSamples.html

You'd need to run it on a Windows machine with a modem.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 05 '11 at 12:55

1

I know you were looking for an iOS solution, but it another option might be to switch her to an android phone, since android gives you MUCH more access to basic, deep-down elements of the OS, including access to the voice data stream.

answered Oct 05 '11 at 12:55

cdeszaq

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Can an iOS app control a phone call?

3 Answers3