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Phone Tree Faxing Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on from the just-da-fax-ma'am dept.

ptb asks: "Since I am sure that someone in the Slashdot community at large has developed a solution to this question I figured I would ask. I am trying to get the company I work for to abandon a fax solution vendor for an in-house developed solution. I've managed to implement hylafax and faxing PDFs from a Web page works flawlessly. (I am embarrassed I didn't have to do more, but hey... ;) My question is: has anyone ever developed a Phone Tree under Unix? What I'm hoping to do is have customers call a number, have my Linux box answer and the customer presses '1' to order a document or '2' to order an index... You get the idea. If they order document '23532' then my perl script will fax them the doc. I've found ACS and Quicknet but I suspect that someone has traveled this road before me. Any suggestions?"

5 comments

  1. Telephony Hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Check out Natural Microsystems site at http://opentelecom.org Open software solutions for codec boards from several manufactures. [You have to collect the touch tones somehow.] Later, ~

  2. mgetty + voice by ehovland · · Score: 1

    mgetty + voice has the low level capability you need as well as a perl interface. You will end up doing a lot of the work to do this yourself. But the pieces are there.

    Find mgetty here.

  3. Re: I once implemented a system like this. by InitZero · · Score: 1

    Ditto.

    My last job was with Florida Call 511, a project of the BellSouth Real Yellow Pages. We used Dialogic cards and handled several thousand calls an hour on a pair of 486-33s with 32 meg of RAM and 96 ports.

    Dialogic has some great libraries (C; I don't think they do perl) and even better hardware. Even with 48 ports off-hook, the machine didn't break a sweat. (Fast SCSI drives are a must for this sort of application, by the way.) We ran the boards under SunSoft Interactive Unix (ugh!) though Solaris (x86; ugh!) and, if I remember correctly, BSD are supported platforms.

    Of note, Dialogic boards aren't free. Neither are phone lines. Before you abandon the fax service vendor, make sure you have a firm grasp of what it is you want to do. It is just about impossible to make any money at faxing and even with deep pockets for promotion, it ain't easy to break even. (After five years of trying, huge promotion, a staff of 20 and millions of dollars, my division was axed for being a giant money-sucking pit.)

    InitZero

  4. Mgetty/Sendfax/Vgetty by QzII · · Score: 1

    Don't know if this will solve the problem but have you checked out mgetty?

    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fa x-faq/mgetty+sendfax+vgetty/

  5. I once implemented a system like this. by muonzoo · · Score: 3

    I was using telephony hardware from Dialogic Corp. The cards were ISA based and handled either 4 or 16 POTS lines or up to 2 T1 terminations.
    The cards shipped with libraries that had a C-based API and a straight-forward state machine was able to capture the interaction model very nicely. The whole system was implemented in C with a Motif GUI.
    I think we were using Solaris x86, I noticed that there doesn't appear to be a mention of linux on the Dialogic site. This might be problematic. Perhaps other cards are available, I noticed that the more recent kernels have support for the PhoneJack hardware -- perhaps it can be used for this purpose.

    These days, Dialogic offers their QuadSpan VoiceSeries PCI based cards that look like the modern version of the old cards that I was using. I implemented a tight table driven state machine for the interaction model. It was fun and very straightforward.
    The system was used to call people in communities and alert them of changes in oil and gas drilling operations in their vicinity, as required by law.