Build Your Own Phone Tree? 28
ps asks: "A small club I belong to is looking to install an electronic phone tree. This is one of those boxes that you can call into, leave a message, and it will deliver that message to all the members of a group. There are ones commercially available for over $1000, but this seems like something that wouldn't be too difficult to build. I could imagine that either a sound card based system, or a specially designed microprocessor system would work. Has anyone built one of these before?"
I've seen (Score:1)
Asterisk PBX system (Score:4, Informative)
Voice modem with vgetty (Score:5, Informative)
Bayonne (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bayonne (Score:3, Informative)
Now if someone would like to correct me if I'm wrong, I'd sure appreciate it as I'm trying to figure out an inexpensive IVR solution myself.
happy dude - the simpsons (Score:3, Funny)
-Vic
Re:happy dude - the simpsons (Score:3, Funny)
Upoc (Score:4, Informative)
VOCP (Score:4, Informative)
Just hire a phone hottie! (Score:3, Funny)
:-)
Re:Just hire a phone hottie! (Score:2)
mgetty (vgetty) + VCOP does the trick (Score:5, Interesting)
ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/unix/networking/m
Does the trick quite nicely. VCOP (see sourceforge) gives you some perl glue code to make things a bit easier.
But I found that using vgetty raw from mod_perl was just as easy. You do need to be careful in what modem you use - and will find that the cheap cards are either not compatible enough - or have limitations like 15 seconds of sound.
Fore something way neater: see:
http://www.quicknet.net/
which has a linejack card which can do the 'world' - including complex caller interaction and dsp based detection. I found it to work reasonable on linux (RH7.0) and very robust on FreeBSD 4.x - but for your application it is probably overkill.
Dw
Use VXML (Score:2, Interesting)
Why use phones? (Score:1, Insightful)
Get a web site.
Get email
Re:Why use phones? (Score:1)
How is this a troll? It's quite possible that the original question was asked with budget telemarketing in mind, and perhaps this should be addressed
1; I believe there are laws against unsolicited automatic messages in the USA.
2; Even if there aren't (there are no laws in New Zealand against it) it's far more obnoxous than regular telemarketing. I've only ever recieved two such calls, one from the Fire Service promoting smoke alarms and one from a citizens group concerned about local government spending. Both groups got such a large and hostile response that they almost immediately abandoned the technique.
I hope that's not what the original question-asker had in mind, and if it was I strongly advise them to rethink their position..
Re:Why use phones? (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe in some states that's the case, but I get them all the time here in California. Just got one tonight:
"Hello. You have been selected to receive a free three-day vacation to Las Vegas! Just answer the following three questions: (1) Are you single? (2) Do you own a home? (3) What is your annual income?"
An obvious time-share scam. As if any legitimate company has so many vacations to give away that they can't get a human to ask the questions!
At least spam never interrupts me when I'm polishing the bishop. Popup windows, maybe, but not email messages.
Done it, pretty much.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The key part was a small C program that played and recorded modem-format audio and interpreted the keypresses, which I wrote because vgetty (at that time) didn't support my modem and lacked several other features I wanted. I set up a project on sourceforge for it here [sourceforge.net]. Please don't mail me to tell me how bad my code is, I'm well aware already :).
Re:Done it, pretty much.. (Score:2, Funny)
What! The BBS scene is dead!? NOOOOOOOO!!!!
how about TTY/TTD? (Score:2)
Re:how about TTY/TTD? (Score:2)
It may be possible to drive a Winmodem (which does most of the work in the main CPU) in a way that emulates a Bell 103A modem, but as far as I know, no one has done it.
TDD, incidentally, is 45.45 baud, 5 bit, Baudot, Bell 103A frequency shift keying. Both ends send using the "originate" tone pair, and are silent after about 500ms of no traffic. So the system is half duplex. This was originally a cheap hack to allow reuse of used 5-level mechanical teletypes, but now it's an obsolete format that requires overpriced "medical" equipment. Special TDD modems cost upwards of $300 now, and they look an lot like ancient computer modems with a new label.
Bigmouth is $295 (Score:2)
We looked into this about two years ago and found that the Bigmouth [evs7.com] did most of what we wanted for $295. I left before they bought it, but it was the solution we were going with at the time.
Re:Bigmouth is $295 (Score:1)
Holy crap. It was $295 when I bought one to use as an "answering machine" almost ten years ago.
If you're looking for a Bigmouth, hunt around in a surplus store first, as you might get lucky. It's an 8-bit ISA card. Odds are that everything it did can now be replaced with a bit of software and your sound card.
Re:Bigmouth is $295 (Score:2)
Dialogic Corp makes excellent hardware for this. (Score:2, Informative)
See my previous posting about a system I implemented here [slashdot.org] .
The company that offered the dial-out product no longer produces interactive outgoing voice systems or I would include a link here.