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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 $1000, but this seems like something that wouldn't be too difficult to build. I could imagine that either a sound card based system, or a specially designed microprocessor system would work. Has anyone built one of these before?"
phone systems that hook into your computer to handle voicemail, I believe one of these could be jury-rigged to do what you want. however, the last one I saw was made by Micro$oft, and I doubt it still is sold.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
You may want to check out the Asterisk PBX system, as it has an application API so you can make it do pretty much whatever you want.
An old PC with voice modem and vgetty would do the trick. vgetty 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.
http://bayonne.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.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
"Hello, this is Happy Dude. If you want eternal happiness, please send $1 to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace."
-Vic
It may take the fun out of it, but Upoc 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 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.
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.
:-)
If you are not scared of using perl; the mgetty(vgetty) included with the varies unix fax options:
g et ty/.
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
Checkout Tellme Studio. 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.
Phones are intrusive, and phone spam is the worst of all.
Get a web site.
Get email
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. Please don't mail me to tell me how bad my code is, I'm well aware already :).
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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.
Years ago I tried to interest two major phone companies in offering a voice box service to keep my running club in contact. BT UK told me I'd just have to get a physical line put in somewhere, even if it was permanently diverted to a central voice box. Snooze you lose.
We looked into this about two years ago and found that the Bigmouth 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.
You might see if you can get a hold of a Dialogic Board.
See my previous posting about a system I implemented here .
The company that offered the dial-out product no longer produces interactive outgoing voice systems or I would include a link here.