Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.