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Replacing Orange's Wildfire with Asterisk?
Loconut1389 asks: "In 1994, Wildfire Communications released a telephone based voice recognition agent that kept track of contacts, and given a schedule or a list of numbers where to reach you, would try and contact you at places you might be when someone calls in. Wildfire was in service through a number of companies, until 2005 when Orange pulled the plug. I had the pleasure of being frustrated with misunderstandings, but thoroughly enjoyed the concept, and it was a worthwhile product. Just before they closed up the Wildfire shop, they had a version that didn't require training. In any case, I was wondering if Asterisk, with some extension modules, had come far enough to replace the functionality of the Wildfire service? Has anyone had experience with the original Wildfire product that could recommend a modern equivalent, even if it was commercial?"
https://www22.verizon.com/iobi/
access to and control of your communications from any location.It connects multiple devices, such as your PC, laptop, and phone, so that
you can do all this from one place:
Access Caller ID and Voice Mail
Route incoming calls to Voice Mail or another number in real time
Schedule Call Forwarding in advance
Send Email and Text Messages
View and update an Address Book and Calendar
And more
And that's just the beginning.If you're an iobi customer, or want more information about our current
products, select one of the links below.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Yes, Asterisk can do all of the above (and more). FreePBX (disclaimer: I'm one of the devs) is a GUI/config for asterisk that provides those capabilities out of the box.
As far as voice recognition, some work has been started with integrating voice recoginition and asterisk, using both open source (ie, Sphinx) and proprietary voice recoginition engines. Voice recoginition is a hard thing to do, and if not done almost perfectly, it's basically usless.
Speak before you think
Actually I think I'm maintaining all of the non ATT owned wildfire servers remaining in the US. I get mixed responses from people on the voice recognition, it works great for me unless there is tons of background noise. All you have to do is train it once for each one of your phone locations. There are a few things it could do, but the version we're running isn't that new. Outlook integration, fax receive, email notifications, and some various find me follow me refinements would be nice to have.
I also run a handful of Asterisk servers and one of these days I'll clone WF's feature set on asterisk. I've been told the final version of Wildfire that got shelved had all of the features I want then some I can't recall who bought them and their IP at the moment. Asterisk is the key to developing the replacement. Supposedly someone has setup a cmu:sphinx server with asterisk that works on a limited dictionary, so thats a step in the right direction. In the meantime we're still selling WildFire service and people are still using it.
If you are in the U.S., you can keep using Wildfire through CR Technologies, Inc.; don't know anything about them other than I have been following the Wildfire saga, and know that CR advertises continued Wildfire services. For everyone suggesting ways to set up a "follow me/find me" feature, please check out the demos on CR Technologies' web site, because you are kind of missing the point of the original poster's desire to re-establish Wildfire in his life.
Followme, which has been greatly improved in the upcoming 2.2 release
Speak before you think