Kevin Junghans

It looks like Google has killed its unofficial weather service API.  I caught wind of it when I saw a lot of inquiries about it on StackOverflow .  Now when you make a request to the API it returns "Unsupported API".  One of VoiceModels examples used the Google weather API to demonstrate how to get information from a service and voice it back.  When I found this out I searched for another free weather service and found MSN. The example WeatherVoice now uses the MSN service.  The example was written so that it is easy to insert new services or even use a mock-up service when testing.  If you need a replacement for using the Google weather API you may want to check out the example to see how you can use MSN for the same information.

In this post I will show you how to use the Google Weather API to retrieve current weather conditions that can be voiced back to callers.  In a previous post I showed how to use VoiceModel to create a simple VoiceXML application that asks the caller for their zip code, looks up the the weather conditions for that zip, and then voices the information back to the caller; but I used a mock-up for the service that retrieves the weather information for easier testing.  This time I will demonstrate how to swap out the mock-up for a functioning service to get the current weather.  Since the underlying architecture for VoiceModel is ASP.NET MVC this method would work just as well in a web application. The way I implemented the Weather Application the service to retrieve the weather information implements the interface IWeatherService . This allows me to easily insert a mock-up for testing or any version of a service that I wish to.  I chose the Google Weather API because ...