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Build Your Own Phone Tree?

Posted by Cliff on from the D-I-Y dept.

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?"

3 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. mgetty (vgetty) + VCOP does the trick by dirkx · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  2. Use VXML by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. Done it, pretty much.. by zcat_NZ · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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. Please don't mail me to tell me how bad my code is, I'm well aware already :).

    --
    455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2