Phone Tree Faxing Solutions?

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?"

Comments

I once implemented a system like this.

[muonzoo]

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.