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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?"
When Wildfire launched five years ago, it was an innovative service offering Orange customers the opportunity to access voice messages. However, over the last eighteen months user numbers have declined rapidly and during a recent review of the service it became clear that Wildfire does not offer some key features that many Orange customers have come to expect from their answer phone service. As a result, it has now become financially and technically impractical to run the service.
That is total and complete bullshit. For starters, Orange were actively refusing customers who requested Wildfire be added to their account for at least three years before they pulled the plug. I'd lost count of the people I demonstrated Wildfire to who immediately called Orange to have it added to their account only be be told they were not taking any more customers.
Secondly, just WHAT features did it not have that 'many Orange customers have come to expect from their answer phone service' - WHAT? The only 'feature' that you could do with the regular crappy Orange answerphone that you couldn't do with Wildfire was forward a message to someone. Does ANYONE EVER do this..?? If it was a feature you couldn't live without, then nobody was forcing you to keep wildfire. Since Hutchison sold Orange it went down the pan. It's obviously run by cretins - don't even get me started on their fucking stupid data plans. Sure - have a new 3G phone at £4 PER MEGABYTE. What? You can take a data plan that's only £4 for 4 Mb? Great! Except... what's that? No you can't have off peak data as well as that silly! Fucking. Morons.