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?"

Comments

Asterisk PBX system

[magiccap22]

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.

Voice modem with vgetty

[KarlH420]

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.

Bayonne

[dsb3]

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.

Upoc

[elfkicker]

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

[zorg]

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.

mgetty (vgetty) + VCOP does the trick

[dirkx]

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

Done it, pretty much..

[zcat_NZ]

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 :).