Has anybody seen API for controlling the phone functionality? I was thinking if it is possible to write an app to record phone conversations...

I suppose that an API will be released, I hope so. Some things that I would like to see on that API would be :

• SMS management (create, send, access, ...)
• Call management (automatic, store, ... speech to text or even text to speech?)

And of course, some easy python bindings ;-)

Hear, hear

Just google for "oFono", that should give you at least a preliminary idea of what telephony API will be.

Thanks for the link! It does not seem to support audio recording functions at the moment, though.

Voice call handling

The voice call interface handles simple call creation and
termination. It also supports 3way-calling and multi-party
features.

This is only for voice control. It doesn't contain support
for the voice data path/routing.

oFono is not part of Fremantle, even if parts of the Fremantle telephony stack might end up in oFono some day.

There is no "Telephony API" as such and actually some of the use cases you are listing seem to belong to other components. I didn't have the time to ask today but Daniel/Soumya will look at this next week with the aim of adding some clarity in the Maemo 5 Developer Guide.

So don't quote me on this but perhaps PulseAudio and Telepathy could be the places to search for APIs related to voice calls and SMS. And then there is DBus in the very middle of many other actions that you might be relating to "Telephony".

EDIT: can someone move this thread to Development, please?

Could we also please be sure that apps cannot record conversations without people on both ends knowing and agreeing to it in some way... at least a tone or something.

Why? It is not universally illegal.

It may not be, but it's a damn shitty thing to do anyways.

Also, since it's a Linux computer that's always online, there's nothing stopping someone from getting into the tablet and recording your phone calls remotely without you even knowing it.

Mixed feelings on the recording issue. If I'm in customer service hell for an hour, I might like to be able to turn recording on at my whim, without drastically changing the tenor of the conversation. Anyone curious about why this might matter should google "Verizon Math".