What the heck is an API?!

I always tell people that what makes VoiceBunny innovative and exciting is the API. The term API gets thrown around frequently on the web and in tech circles, but what is it? It stands for Application Programming Interface…yeah, I know, that’s not very helpful. The Wikipedia article about APIs is very technical, but really just has one sentence you need to know:

An API is a software-to-software interface, not a user interface. With APIs, applications talk
to each other without any user knowledge or intervention.

Basically, with an API, you program your computer to “talk” to ours. “User interface” in our case would be this, our web form used to post projects manually.  If you needed 20 projects voiced right away, you can see how it would be tedious work to fill out this form 20 times.  Now, what if you needed hundreds of voiceovers?! VoiceBunny gives developers direct access to our technology so individuals and companies can let the computers do the hard work. This is an example of what a developer might see when using the API:

Yes, it still looks complicated but developers understand what is happening and can use the code to automatically post projects rather than going through the prettier, yet more tedious, web form.  In fact, you are probably interacting with APIs right now!  Ever viewed a Google Map on a store’s website?  You are using the Google Maps API. Ever clicked the button on a website to share that content on Facebook?  You used the Facebook API.

The most exciting part about the VoiceBunny API is to see users bring voiceover to where it has never been before.  For example, a newspaper or magazine could have a podcast created automatically by using our API to pull the text of articles and post projects for them (this is exactly what Fred Wilson’s blog does if you want to “hear” it in action).  As with most acronyms or terms that sound complicated, once you understand what’s happening, it’s pretty simple.