Auto Dialing Business Card

I wanted to take a moment to highlight an unique use of DTMF tones. In the IVR world, we are all familiar with the MF tones that make the magic happen within our applications. Here at MTI we are big proponents of speech recognition technology but like it or not, we realize that touchtones are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Being the weekend tinkerer that I am, I ran across an article last weekend on one of my favorite websites instructables.com. Instructables operates on the theory that the more people realize they can create their own stuff, the less likely they will be to squander our increasingly scarce resources on “cheap” stuff .

The concept of the card is pretty simple, embed a small micro controller that plays a series of preprogrammed DTMF tones. When the business card is tapped against the mouthpiece of the phone, the DTMF tones are played and the user is connected to the telephone number without dialing. If you are handy with a soldering iron you can find complete instructions here

Below is a video of the card in action. The audio is a little faint, but you get the concept.