Build Your Own Phone Tree?

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

[Stone Rhino]

phone systems that hook into your computer to handle voicemail, I believe one of these could be jury-rigged to do what you want. however, the last one I saw was made by Micro$oft, and I doubt it still is sold.

Asterisk PBX system

[magiccap22]

You may want to check out the Asterisk PBX [asteriskpbx.com] system, as it has an application API so you can make it do pretty much whatever you want.

Voice modem with vgetty

[KarlH420]

An old PC with voice modem and vgetty [greenie.net] would do the trick. vgetty [faqs.org] can turn any PC with a voice modem into an answering machine. vgettty would record the message. Then some script could go through the call list of numbers you have, and play the message to them.

Bayonne

[dsb3]

http://bayonne.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] is, last I checked, the current location of the GNU IVR (interactive voice response) system. If you want to learn a bit about programming for voice it shouldn't be too hard to put together something that works for the cost of hardware.

Re:Bayonne

[fwc]

The problem with bayonne-as far as I can tell-is that it runs on fairly expensive IVR hardware. It's too bad it doesn't support more traditional Hardware Voice Modems (such as the USR ones).

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

[krs-one]

"Hello, this is Happy Dude. If you want eternal happiness, please send $1 to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace."

-Vic

Re:happy dude - the simpsons

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hello, this is Homer Simpson, aka Happy Dude. The court has ordered me to call every person in town to apologise for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!"

Upoc

[elfkicker]

It may take the fun out of it, but Upoc [upoc.com] offers a free service that works a bit like this. It's build more around SMS and email, but you can also leave voice message that can be checked from any phone or online. I've found it pretty useful once in awhile. There's probably similiar services out there.

VOCP

[zorg]

VOCP [sourceforge.net] should be good for this. I use this at home and have it set up to email the messages to me at home or work according to the time. Works very well.

Just hire a phone hottie!

[EvilStein]

It's probably cheaper. Just find some sultry sounding girl to answer the phone and pretend she's the IVR. People will just press random buttons to see what she'll say next.

:-)

Re:Just hire a phone hottie!

[SuiteSisterMary]

A lot of companies who sell phone equipment to do stuff like this have, on staff, 'talent' to come over to your business and record all the prompts and what not. Hired, obviously, for voice.

mgetty (vgetty) + VCOP does the trick

[dirkx]

If you are not scared of using perl; the mgetty(vgetty) included with the varies unix fax options:

ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/unix/networking/mg et ty/.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Checkout Tellme Studio [tellme.com]. You can create a free account that allows users to dial in. You can dynamic menus and all that--you just point it to a CGI on your own box. I don't know if you could record a message over the phone, but you could setup a CGI where users post message online, and then callers can hear them over the phone.

Why use phones?

[angry_beaver]

Phones are intrusive, and phone spam is the worst of all.

Get a web site.

Get email

Re:Why use phones?

[zcat_NZ]

Phones are intrusive, and phone spam is the worst of all.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe there are laws against unsolicited automatic messages in the USA.

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..

[zcat_NZ]

Towards the end of the dialup BBS scene I hacked up "Cherrybomb", which was a fairly complete voicemail BBS written mostly as BASH script. I ran it for two years and at one time it was answering 200 calls a day on two lines. Just recently I dug out the old code and used it for one of our clients to call their tech's when things break down. It's been surprisingly reliable considering that it runs on a P133 and a very old Elcon 14k4 voice modem.

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..

[braek]

Towards the end of the dialup BBS scene...

What! The BBS scene is dead!? NOOOOOOOO!!!!

how about TTY/TTD?

[thogard]

I've been looking for solutions somewhat related to this involving Telephone for the Deaf. It turns out that the TTY phones use some 50baud nonsens that modern modems can't understand but a voice modem should be able to send voice data to a PC which is more than fast enough to decode the data windmodem style in real time. Idealy the system should use a standard messageing client as a the gui. If any one is interested in this, let me know.

Re:how about TTY/TTD?

[Animats]

It used to be that most modems could go down to 103A mode, and serial ports could be switched to 5 bit. So you could talk to a TDD using a suitable program. That's not the case any more.

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

[Ratbert42]

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

[Tackhead]

Bigm0uth is still $295?

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

[Ratbert42]

Yep. Required DOS 2.0 or higher and a 286 or higher. Scary.

Dialogic Corp makes excellent hardware for this.

[muonzoo]

You might see if you can get a hold of a Dialogic Board [dialogic.com].

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.