[geeks] Asterisk gurus anywhere?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net>
>Date: 2007/08/08 Wed PM 08:02:28 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: [geeks] Asterisk gurus anywhere?

>I have a relatively simple customer application that will be run on  
>Asterisk.
>
>Any Asterisk gurus out there?  I need to connect  up DTMF tones with  
>queries to a database, basically.  No text to speech, fancy voice  
>recognition, etc. is needed.

Patrick,

I am not an Asterisk guru, but I did earn my keep in the IVRS business for a number of years, allow me to make a few suggestions:

I really like the product from Katalina Technologies - VoiceGuide (http://voiceguide.com/) - it allows youto take a PC, attach a voice modem, install their software and crank out simple interactive voice systems very quickly using a straight-forward GUI. It runs on WinXP/2000 or higher, and can even work with VoIP directly (but I've not played with that capability). A single line edition is about $100, with the cost rising as you add simultaneous lines. You can download the software and try it out, but the server software shuts down after 10 minutes or so, but that should be enough to see if you like it (there is no time limit on the GUI tool).

There are VoiceXML providers that may be able to take all the "phone work" off your hands - your web servers serve up XML documents to their machines as needed, and you can keep your data local. The model is that the caller dials the service providers machine, it reaches out to your web server, gets the required VoiceXML files (including prerecorded prompts, etc.), and feeds back to your web server the callers responses... I have no one to recommend, but Google should be able to help...

I prefer VoiceGuide, and have done a little bit of work with it - if you decide to go with it I think you'll like it, but unless you are going to use the new VoIP capabilities, I'd suggest investing in an appropriate Dialogic card - they run a few hundred dollars a line (new), but have the best sound quality - voice modens can be used for development/proof-of-concept, but they are not "production grade" IMHO).

Lionel