Ask Slashdot: Linux and Telephony 153
This one is a doosy. I've received various
submissions from people who were looking for
information on how to make their Linux
box into an answering machine. I've also
received submissions asking about Voice
Synthesis and Speech-To-Text. I have to
admit I haven't found much information on
either while browsing on the net, so I'm
turning the question over to you folks. However
I wonder if there isn't a issue hidden here?
Can Linux be used as an Interractive Voice
Response(IVR) platform? If not, why not?
First off, let's NOT forget the actual
questions:
Metiu and Sri both want to know if a Linux box with a voice modem can be used as an answering machine.
Gextyr is looking for information on Voice Synthesis packages that are available for Linux.
This Clan AC Member wants to know if there are any applications or APIs for Linux that deal with Speech-To-Text or Text-To-Speech.
Lastly, there have been quite a few submissions asking whether or not Linux can be used as a demand fax server. Can it?
If Linux can be used for all of the things above, what's stopping it from performing as an IVR system? IVR systems are simply systems designed to use a telephone as the computer interface (using both touch tones and voice). IVR systems are used everywhere, from your voice mail, to ordering systems, and corporations are adopting more and more IVR systems for various tasks.
I've seen IVR implemented on DOS systems but most of these have moved to NT. What's preventing Linux from operating in this market? Are there existing IVR projects in progress, or is this another area where Linux falls behind?
My Linux box is my answering machine (Score:1)
If you want a full voice mail system, search for mwm, which is a bunch of scripts that sit on top of vgetty.
I use a USR Sporster Voice, and the sound quality is not great (8bit 8hz). Check the vgetty FAQ for better quality modems.
Linux, it's my router, it's my firewall, it's my web server, it's my development platform, it's my answering machine, it's the brain of my recording studio.
It doesn't make my coffee, yet...
ISDN and VBOX (Score:1)
using ISDN and vbox. Vbox can be found at
http://www.mayn.de/michael/vbox/
The thing can be configured to listen to arbitrary
numbers and respond automatically after a certain
number of rings.
Some speach apps which are out there. (Score:1)
Browsing Debian's packages also turns up a few others so this like, all Linux solutions, begins with: ``well, first install Debian...''.
-Brett.
Re: ARGH! (Score:1)
Coffee (not reading your LDP?) (Score:1)
http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/mini/Coffee.ht
CMU's Sphinx voice recognition system (Score:1)
I heard recently that some people at CMU will be porting the Sphinx 2 speech recognition system (developed there) to Linux. Not sure about licensing though.
Telephony (Score:1)
I had been wanting to set up a house answering machine with a WWW gateway for some time. I started to write something myself, but found that there are a few utilities out there that do the job for you. I haven't played with mvm too much, but it looks promising. vgetty seems to work pretty well despite having to write the frontend in shell scripts.
http://alpha.greenie.net/mgetty/
http://www-internal.alphanet.ch/~schaefer/mvm/
You'll also need rsynth or some type of text-to-speech package for mvm to work. Good luck.
I'm using an *ordinary modem* + soundcard for IVR (Score:1)
I have hacked together an IVR/answering machine that uses an ordinary modem (not Zyxel type voice modem) and a SoundBlaster type soundcard in Linux. This requires construction of a simple circuit ($5 in parts from Radio Shack) to interface the sound card to the phone line, and a bit of software. I have coded a fast fourier transform DTMF (touchtone) recognizer and I use an 'expect' script for the call flow. If there is sufficient interest I can make a web page with a circuit description and post the code.
Linux Journal (Score:1)
Wasn't there an article in LJ a year or two ago about setup like this? Maybe the guy was just using Linux to control his phone system, but I remember something about voice synthesis.
If you knew my memory...
doing caller-id (vgetty sucks!) (Score:1)
I'm amazed that so many people here say they were able to get vgetty working; you guys must all lead charmed lives, because I spent months fighting with it, and couldn't ever get it to correctly answer the phone and record a message twice in a row.
I settled for having my machine simply use the modem to listen to the caller ID info, and pop up a big old dialog box telling me who's calling, then let my real answering machine take the call.
Features:
Works pretty good. Get the code and read all about it [jwz.org].
My Linux box is my answering machine (Score:1)
We need a TAPI for UNIX. (Score:1)
ARGH! (Score:1)
--
W.A.S.T.E.
A couple of useful links (Score:1)
http://www.opentelecom.org/ [opentelecom.org]
Neither of them answer *my* basic question, which is how to add touch tone response to a web based application I'm working on.
A couple of useful links (Score:1)
Simple question (Score:1)
Voxilla (Score:1)
CTI for Linux (Score:1)
Linux & IVR (Score:1)
First off.. IVR CANNOT be handled by a Voice Modem. Now before you startup the flamethrowers give me a sec... I am dealing with MINIMUM 1 incoming T1, and we have a couple boxes with 8-10 T's... That is up to 230 incoming calls at once, and not one line at a time.
The current KING of the hill (in hardware) is DIALOGIC. BUT Dialogic is DEEPLY in bed with Microsoft. People have been pressuring Dialogic for about 6 years to come out with drivers for Linux, but nothing yet. There have been a couple times when activity on the Dialogic mailing list where rumors have been flying about (last one was something was supposed to happen March 25th), but again NOTHING!
There are a couple companies that seem to be embracing Linux... Pika (Ya! Canadian!), Acculab, and NMS. I suspect that Rhetorex will be the next one to throw their hat into the ring, and the only one missing is Dialogic.
Now for the next important thing... IVR Software. Currently there is nothing out there to handle the IVR back end. BUT there is ample open source languages that could be extended. Database support used to be an issue, now with pretty much every major database on Linux, that is not a problem anymore.
Once you have your basic "Interface" card working, there are a whole bunch of other cards you can add in to get the extended support that you want. SCSA pretty much the standard for connecting cards. Once you have the card, you need the firmware.. Hopefully they will port it over!
Anyway, enough ranting... summary:
ACCULAB, PIKA, and NMS have support for Linux. Dialogic needs to be beaten over the head with a wet fish and have some sense beat into them!
Voxilla is dead... (Score:1)
You can also use the AT+V command set with any voice modem card. I have the chase PCI-RAS4 at home running under linux and it works quite well.
The reason I haven't had time to work on voxilla is that I have been working at VA Research fo the last 6 months and they keep people busy. I'll update the site tonight with a bunch of links to the developments that have been going in all over the place that almost no-one has asked about.
Linux PBX? (Score:1)
Audio widgt software... (Score:1)
used festival fot text-to-speech and some
custome hardware for DTMF decoding. It is
in perl and handels menus quite nicly right
now I have not realeased it only becouse I
wanted to make it work with a voice modem
instead of with my sound card and custom
hard ware but I do not have a voice modem
so it hasent happed. I would gladely give it
out under the GPL if anny one was instread.
Open Speech Project (Score:1)
Now THAT is cool! (Score:1)
/dev
Re:Speech recognition? (Score:1)
BTW, IBM via voice for Linux beta SDK is out for free. I think they said it ships with RH6.0 on the app disc. I downloaded it from IBM, but at 40meg it's quite a hit for a modem.
/dev
PIKA -- Where and how much? (Score:1)
vgetty (Score:1)
I used a Multitech 5600 ZDXV voice modem. I
highly recommend Multitech's if for no reason
other than their no-hassle/no-RMA return policy
and 10 year warranty.
Then I used vgetty to handle answering the phone,
recording stuff, and decoding DTMF tones.
It all works, make sure you have ALL the vgetty
patches. Maybe join the vgetty mail list. If
you don't like hacking scripts and crap together
you won't enjoy setting this up. vgetty is
HIGHLY undocumented.
My Linux box is my answering machine (Score:1)
Well, slacker, get cracking! You could probably wire a soft power switch to a serial port or something and use your carrier to indicate wheter the switch should be on or off...
0 8 * * * 1-5
0 10 * * * 1-5
Or go for the whole thing and wire your sockets with X10..
IVR Hardware is the biggest problem (Score:1)
(Somehow, I'm not too hopeful. Let's see the slashdot effect in action...)
That is cool. Yeah! (Score:1)
CTI & Linux - see Dialogic (Score:1)
Linux now does phone spam? (Score:1)
Orcslicer
mgetty and voice mail url (Score:1)
Linux Telephony - some good answers (Score:1)
Fionn
Linux can be used for an IVR... (Score:1)
Speech recognition? (Score:1)
Will just wants to yell at his robots 8^)
Timely Mtg (Boston): Voice Recognition on Linux (Score:1)
You can always hack one.... (Score:1)
Isn't that the point of the open source initiative? To release the code so others can have a crack at it, to iron out all these bugs? I say 'release the code!'
ARGH! (Score:1)
the modem. A script which starts ppp when it
notices, e.g. three rings, pause, four rings,
would do nicely. That way you can even call from
another country and not spend a penny for the
phone call (assuming that the modem will see as
many "RING"s as you hear on your end).
--d
ARGH! (Score:1)
Example:
I call up my linux box (which I can't keep dialed in 24-7)
It picks up and plays some random audio file, piped into the phone line.
"Press 1 to start ppp interface"
I press 1.
It hangs up. I do the same.
I wait a minute, and then ssh into my machine, thanks to the wonders of a dynamic DNS service and a remotely mailed ifconfig dump.
If this is possible, I'd love to know how.
CK
Linux Telephony - some good answers (Score:1)
http://alpha.greenie.net/mgetty/index.html
http://www.leo.org/~doering/mgetty/index.html
I've been using 1.1.20, with the ZyXel 1496E+ .
I use it for voicemail, incoming logins (i.e. data) and faxes (in and out). Since I work at two locations connected at T1 speed, I like being able to hear my voice messages at each place. And I can also dial it up like a standard answering machine to hear my messages (that I have to re-configure).
I have a number of users who dial in to read their e-mail and do some (slow...) surfing; ppp works
well. The current vgetty appears to be quite stable, and doesn't slip into recording white noise instead of voice as much. My PII-350 box runs Slackware 3.6.
What I would REALLY like to see is a voice-mail system which can connect a voice channel over the LAN to another CPU selected according to the tones punched in by a caller. That sort of thing has been developed for MS
Commercial and Open Source offerings for UNIX (Score:1)
A nice Open Sourced options is EARS, one of the few.. and probally one of the first UNIX speech -> text applications. Although I personally have had some difficulty compiling it under Linux. http://www.tmt.de/~stephan/ears.html
Also, there are many output programs, the best one available is called festival and can be found in above comments and on freshmeat, but is somewhat bloated. Alternatives maybe found in the "say" program, which is distributed with "GxEdit" (find it on freshmeat as well), Emacs text->speech: http://www.cs.vassar.edu/mirror/emacspeak/emacspe
If none of these are suited for your needs try:
http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_soundapps.
The Linux sound/midi page is a valuable tool !
DDlinux Speech Recognition Mailing List (Score:1)
FYI, there's a mailing list about
speech recognition on Linux. The
home page for the list is
http://leb.net/ddlinux/
From the "Current Status":
Discussion on ddlinux is currently on hiatus while we wait for various open-source speech recognition engines to mature (a process which is likely to
result in something useful to us in mid-1999). Ddlinux therefore operates as an announcement list, so traffic is very low.
They have a few useful links and discussions.
Emre |=^)
ARGH! (Score:1)
dtmf_program
/usr/local/bin/dtmf.sh will get called with all the numbers you typed.
Check Open Telecom http://www.opentelecom.org/ (Score:1)
Speech recognition? (Score:1)
Last I heard, the only open-source thing of this sort was something called 'ears'. I've never heard of anybody actually using it, which suggests it might perform underwhelmingly (tho, again, I've never tried it myself so this is just a guess).
A good OSS speech-rec program would have all kinds of uses. It would be a no-brainer for the wearable-computer people. It would be great for any PDA with a microphone. Maybe speech recognition could ease some peoples' fears of the command line, or avoid wrist injuries.
There is some relevant stuff in the FAQ for comp.speech. A web search for "speech recognition", "phoneme", and "hidden markov model" turned up a lot of interesting hits.
Text2Speech (Score:1)
One of these days I'm going to see if I can get it to work from my Netwinder.
speech2text (Score:1)
Toe-stepping == good (Score:1)
Voice systems -- lots of proprietary hardware (Score:1)
We then looked at a PC-based voicemail system that would integrate with our LAN mail package, and the stumbling block there wasn't storage as disk space is so cheap when you're buying computer disks, but all the proprietary interface cards for interconnecting our Nortel switch. We would have needed something like $5k worth of boards (all ISA, no PCI available) to do the interfacing.
I'm guessing this is going to be a stumbling block for any linux-based system. Most PBX systems are pretty proprietary and so are the interfaces, which means that not only are you single-sourcing interfaces but you're paying a fortune for them as well.
I don't know how voice modems get the voice part into the computer -- through the serial port or through the sound card -- but if it's through the serial port, you could probably do a standalone voicemail-only system with a multiport serial card and a bunch of voice modems.
You'd still be screwed when it came to interfacing with PBXs, though. You could do the voicemail, but there would be no access to the PBX itself, which means you could only leave messages. No rollover to operators, calling back into the PBX, etc.
Most organization that have PBXs have also sunk a ton of money into them, so convincing people that the low-cost linux voicemail system would be a good investment when they'd throw out PBX features might be a tough sell.
Excelent Text-To-Speech (Score:1)
I'm using an *ordinary modem* + soundcard for IVR (Score:1)
For less than $1200 PER YEAR? (Score:1)
Reliable is defined as your software crashes less often than Windows-NT.
re: speech to text (Score:1)
ISP (Score:1)
Linux & IVR (Score:1)
Linux IVR in development (Score:1)
-Yuk
CTI & Linux - see Dialogic (Score:1)
-Yuk
Speech Synthesis (Score:1)
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.speech/ [cmu.edu]
In particular, take a look at:
http://www.speech.cs.cm u.edu/comp.speech/Section5/Q5.5.html [cmu.edu]
Two speech synthesis programs I have played with are:
rsynth: ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/ pub/comp.speech/synthesis/ [cam.ac.uk]
Festival: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/f estival.html [ed.ac.uk]
text-to-speech answers (Score:1)
For those with the DECtalk card, one might consider "emacspeak" available from the Debian or Slackware distributions.
Tele-computer Controller (Score:1)
Re:Rsynth, festival (Score:1)
It will read out the contents of filename. I have
set it up with a female voice and use netcat to
attach it to a port on my client machine, then
other computers on the network can telnet to it
(using expect) and send ascii words that get spoken on my workstation. E.g., "I cannot ping
the mailserver at so and so". Well, I think it
is interesting. tts of this quality used to cost
thousands.
An IVR in an Enterprise System -- Perhaps Not (Score:1)
The second problem is that a lot of the IVR systems are custom built by system integrators, who are usually more familiar with NT or OS/2 (large in the IVR market) than with NT.
Are there any moves been made by an existing IVR vendor to port their systems over to linux?
Re: ARGH! (Score:1)
CTI on Linux (Score:1)
Our choice platform used to be Dialogic with their nice hardware or Talking Technologies, Inc. with their Powerline II card on MS-DOS (the Windows NT platform was never stable enough and we used to get complaints about that), but I can't seem to find an API/lib for Linux.
Is there anybody out there doing CTI/Linux right now? Our company is willing to try any hardware that supports a stable and free OS such as Linux.
Help plug Linux on Dialogic Survey (Score:1)
There's a survey at http://www.dialogic.com/uk/forms/ossu rvey.htm [dialogic.com] which asks what OSes we use (and perhaps would like to use CTI on). It says UK on the URL and Diaogic customer on the page, but I'm sure they won't mind if we showed them our support for our favorite OS. If you would like to see a Dialogic SDK for Linux, please sign up!
Festival Text To Speech (TTS) (Score:1)
It comes with several British voice. Several American, a Mexican Spanish and a German voice are available from Oregon Graduate Institue [ogi.edu].
Call me a nerd but I like to hear the original voices quotes my favorite lines from Monty Python.
--DTMF...RTFM (Score:1)
You can always hack one.... (Score:1)
I was thinking of putting it out on the Net, but due to creeping featurism the code is embarassing.
A couple of useful links (Score:1)
Text -> Speech (Score:1)
It was somewhere in the sound section of metalabs.unc.edu
QuMa
SohoVoice & vgetty (Score:1)
currently, vgetty uses hard-coded modem support, and is a little difficult to hack to get working with modems that aren't supported in the release. so if you don't have a modem that vgetty currently supports, it takes a little hacking to get it working. this could be overcome if vgetty moved to a plain-text file for modem configuration, sort of like the (eek)
anyways... there are programs out there. mvm, and other vgetty scripts that sit on top of vgetty.
Linux Computer Telephony offerings (Score:1)
The best resource I've found for finding out about Linux and Computer Telephony is www.linuxtelephony.org [linuxtelephony.org]. They even leaked about Aculab's Linux support policy last year (it was only announced in February officially).
As an engineer working in the CT industry, I'm seeing more and more companies considering real, money-earning projects using Linux. We're starting to see support for Linux from other CT vendors, and I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft's investment in Dialogic is a reaction to that. My personal prediction is that we'll see Linux and Solaris grabbing an increasing share of these types of applications, so it should get easier and easier to get Linux drivers and software for CT cards. Aculab certainly plans to expand on Linux support from what I can see.
Solid Compact PCI and hot-swap support under Linux would help a lot in this application area though.
--- Calum
Drivers are coming soon... (Score:1)
My sources at Dialogic [dialogic.com] say they'll probably have a Linux port of their drivers out sometime early next year, while the good folks at Aculab [aculab.com] already have Linux drivers for some of their products and will release more Linux drivers in the coming months.
Aculab is also pretty good about releasing hardware specs if you're really interested in doing a port yourself. Dialogic has never quite understood that they could boost sales of their products by releasing enough information to allow outside parties to write more drivers.
Linux Voice Mail system (Score:1)
http://www.nexpath.com [nexpath.com]
This is a SCO based phone system which we happen to use here at work and it works quite well. I was browsing their FTP site one day and happened to notice some Linux files...some headers and what looked like a lowlevel driver of some sort. I didn't look into it much. (in
CTI under Linux (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
List of Linux speech synthesis / analysis links (Score:1)
Not much help on the telephony-specific angle, but for general purpose speech synthesis and analysis info for Linux, check out the Linux Audio Developers' Resource Page [bright.net].
Why does it seem like suggesting this link is my answer to many Ask Slashdot questions? Maybe we need a FAQdot!
Div.
--
But my grandest creation,
As history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle,
Hardware? (Score:1)
Linux IVR (Score:1)
You might also want to check out http://www.opentelecom.org [opentelecom.org]
One thing that I found particularly interesting about Natural Microsystems is that rather then developing Linux drivers, they open-sourced their existing drivers and, of course, Linux drivers soon followed.
Commercial and Open Source offerings for UNIX (Score:1)
Also be sure to have a look through the LDP howtos -- there is an Emacsspeak howto. Should be handy.
Linux IVR (Score:1)
HOW-TO
OpenH323 (another link) (Score:1)
http://www.openH323.org/ [openh323.org]
Juan
ARGH! (Score:2)
I used it for a long time with vgetty to act as an answering machine. If the phone rang once, it dialed up ppp. If it went for 4 or 5, I forget now, vgetty would pick up and record a message.
My beef with vgetty was that it would not play any message to greet callers. So only family/friends knew that when it beeped (it was quite a loud beep too), just start talking. The many times I tried, it either left the phone on hook until I went back home to reset it, or would just play an empty hiss for the length of the sound file.
Because voice modems suck. (Score:2)
To get really intelligable sound, you need some kind of dedicated, expensive, phone hardware.
KVoice (Score:2)
You can do demand fax serving with HylaFax.
Other than that, I don't know of any text->speech or speech->text projects. Unfortunately it's not something that can be done very easily for free - it requires a huge investment of time, hence why these speech->text systems were originally hugely expensive.
Matt.
Some speach apps which are out there. (Score:2)
Its a system-hog though. I tried to use it to read e-mails to me through my voice system (see my other posting in here about it), but I found it took several minutes per message to put the audio together... Hardly worth it. Hell, my system is so slow, even using say to generate timestamps is too slow.
ARGH! (Score:2)
I shied away from dynamic DNS and just e-mail the number to my pcs phone.
One tip -- make sure you have an activity timeout on it, so if you dial it up accidently, or you (for whatever reason) don't get the dynamic DNS to update or get the e-mail that you can still cause it to disconnect.
Throw a secure webserver on there, and just make some simple CGI's to trigger a delay to bring the machine back off the network.
On my system I've got an X10 automation setup too, so I can remotely turn on other systems in my apartment. (Useful if I'm a bonehead and leave a file I need at home...)
Speech recognition? (Score:2)
The main problem with speech recognition over the telephone is that the digital standard currently used by the PSTN samples voice at 8khz, with each sample being 8-bits wide. As a result, the speech recognition engine just doesn't have a whole lot of data to play with -- Speech recognition algorithms typically use a lot of statistics to determine how well a given chunk of speech matches a word stored in its vocabulary. The less data in the incoming speech, the harder it is to be accurate with a match. In fact, it actually gets harder, as many cell phones use various encoders to further reduce the data rate. Add that to interference and background noise, and ASR over the phone is decidedly not easy.
Many of the shrink-wrapped ASR applications that you see are designed to work through the microphone jack on a computer, which provides much more data than is available over the phone network. IBM, L&H and Dragon are the vendors I'm aware of.
Now, there are various vendors out there who do ASR for phone applications. Nortel (my employer, but not my project) has one, as does VCS, Nuance Communications and several others. These, however, are not generally priced for the consumer market. In addition, many of these solutions run on Digital Signal Processors, which require additional cards....
OSS speech rec would be a good thing, but I'm afraid that it's going to be a while before it comes to pass, just because of the complexity of the statistics and the specific knowledge required. Those reasons also mean that it'll probably be a while before a PDA has the juice for it.
(There's the urban legend of the guy presenting ASR control of his computer at a voice conference, when a voice from the back of the room shouts "Format c: Return" and somebody else chimes in "Yes Return")
Linux Telephony - some good answers (Score:2)
linuxtelephony.com is an omnibus site, which has seemed not to have had any updates recently, and
opentelecom.org which, well, has.
On a lower level front, it's possible to use mgetty+sendfax and Gert Doering's vgetty to build answering machine type stuff and also, possibly, 2-call fax response. I'm not sure about 1 call; switching modes can be messy.
This stuff works with the old Zyxel 1496+ modems, among others, and _maybe_ with the Rockwell voice chips, but I'm not sure; the Zyxel's ought to be, roughly, free, by now.
Cheers,
mgetty and voice mail (Score:2)
CTI for Linux (Score:2)
Linux now does phone spam? (Score:2)
I wonder how long it will be before that happens? I'm not sure what systems are used now, but they can't be cheap.
Maybe I can set up my box to call them back? Or at least filter out the unsolicited calls or maybe even have preprogrammed answers to use up their time. Now there are some ideas.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Reveal's Serial-and-soundcard interface (Score:2)
Some VM100 FreeBSD code here. [freebsd.org]
A press mention of the VM100 in Byte [byte.com]
Dialogic support? OK, but too late for me. (Score:2)
Yes, I'm doing this now (Score:2)
I'm also in the middle of using this technology to provide a replacement for an old VRU (Voice Response Unit) from IBM. It grabs data from an AS/400 and provides information to customers on current shipments etc.
Very easy to write. My next project involved with this is to use ears, or something like it to convert the voice to text (and then send it to my pager)
CTI for Linux (Score:2)
Voice systems -- lots of proprietary hardware (Score:2)
No text to speech or voice recognition.
For more on Linux telephony see:
http://www.linuxtelephony.org/
It's just AT commands for the most part (Score:3)
7.5 CALLER ID COMMANDS
#CID=0 Disable Caller ID.
#CID=1 Enable Caller ID with formatted presentation.
#CID=2 Enable Caller ID with unformatted presentation.
7.6 FAX CLASS 1 COMMANDS
+FCLASS=n Service class.
+FAE=n Data/fax auto answer
+FRH=n Receive data with HDLC framing.
+FRM=n Receive data.
+FRS=n Receive silence.
+FTH=n Transmit data with HDLC framing.
+FTM=n Transmit data.
+FTS=n Stop transmission and wait.
7.7 FAX CLASS 2 COMMANDS
+FCLASS=n Service class.
+FAA=n Adaptive answer.
+FAXERR Fax error value.
+FBOR Phase C data bit order.
+FBUF? Buffer size (read only).
+FCFR Indicate confirmation to receive.
+FCLASS= Service class.
+FCON Facsimile connection response.
+FCIG Set the polled station identification.
+FCIG: Report the polled station identification.
+FCR Capability to receive.
+FCR= Capability to receive.
+FCSI: Report the called station ID.
+FDCC= DCE capabilities parameters.
+FDCS: Report current session.
+FDCS= Current session results.
+FDIS: Report remote capabilities.
+FDIS= Current sessions parameters.
+FDR Begin or continue phase C receive data.
+FDT= Data transmission.
+FDTC: Report the polled station capabilities.
+FET: Post page message response.
+FET=N Transmit page punctuation.
+FHNG Call termination with status.
+FK Session termination.
+FLID= Local ID string.
+FLPL Document for polling.
+FMDL? Identify model.
+FMFR? Identify manufacturer.
+FPHCTO Phase C time out.
+FPOLL Indicates polling request.
+FPTS: Page transfer status.
+FPTS= Page transfer status.
+FREV? Identify revision.
+FSPL Enable polling
+FTSI: Report the transmit station ID.
7.8 VOICE COMMANDS
#BDR Select baud rate (turn off autobaud).
#CLS Select data, fax, or voice.
#MDL? Identify model.
#MFR? Identify manufacturer.
#REV? Identify revision level.
#TL Audio output transmit level.
#VBQ? Query buffer size.
#VBS Bits per sample.
#VBT Beep tone timer.
#VCI? Identify compression method.
#VGT Set playback volume in the command state.
#VLS Voice line select.
#VRA Ringback goes away timer (originate).
#VRN Ringback never came timer (originate).
#VRX Voice receive mode.
#VSD Enable silence deletion (no function, command response only).
#VSK Buffer skid setting.
#VSP Silence detection period (voice receive).
#VSR Sampling rate selection.
#VSS Silence detection tuner (voice receive).
#VTD DTMF/tone reporting.
#VTM Enable timing mark placement.
#VTS Generate tone signals.
#VTX Voice transmit mode.
7.9 VOICEVIEW COMMANDS
+FCLASS=n Service class
-SVV Originate VoiceView data mode
-SAC Accept data mode request
-SIP Initialize VoiceView parameters
-SIC Reset capabilities data to default setting
-SSQ Initiate capabilities query
-SDA Originate modem data mode
-SFX Originate FAX data mode
-SMT Mute telephone
-SDS Disable switchhook status monitoring
-SQR Capabilities query response control
-SCD Capabilities data
-SER? Error status (read only)
-DTP VoiceView transmission speed
-SSR Start sequence response control
+FLO Flow control select
+FPR Serial port rate control
-SSV VoiceView data mode start sequence event
-SFA Facsimile data node start sequence event
-SMD Modem data mode start sequence event
-SRA Receive ADSI response event
-SRQ Receive capabilities query event
-SRC: Receive capabilities information event
-STO Talk-off event
7.10 DSVD COMMANDS
-SSE=1 Enable DSVD
-SSE=0 Disable DSVD
Linux IVR (Score:4)
I've currently got an old 486/50 DX running Linux 2.2.5 at home that handles voicemail for me using mgetty and some custom shell scripts. (Unfortunately I was never able to get get vgetty perl module working... its very old and there's almost no docs for it...)
Its pretty slick. People calling can leave voice messages or faxes. I've got it set up so either one gets packaged up in a mime attachment to my e-mail and queued to send to me. Next time the system is online it sends them off. If they sit there more than two hours it'll dial itself up and send them and get back offline. Also archives them so I can get them through a web browser on any systems in my apartment, or I can just hit the reset switch on the front of the system (which is plugged into the parallel port) and it plays any new messages for me. The turbo light blinks when I've got new messages.
I can also control all the X10 stuff in my apartment (mostly useful for options #1 -- turn off all the halogen lights, and #2 -- turn of coffee pot, both reducing the chances that my spacing out one morning will result in my apartment burning down)
Last thing I can do is use it to cause my network to dial up. The system handles my masquerading and internet access as well as voicemail, so when it dials up my entire network is online, then it e-mails the IP address it got to my PCS phone. Secure SLL webpage on that IP address lets me control all those devices directly (especially turning on other PCs), check my messages, or disconnect the network...
The real limiting factor I'd see in using it as an IVR system is more limited support of multi-line voice products, and the poor documentation and difficult programming for vgetty. I'm not sure there are any options other than vgetty.
Using vgetty in combination with packages like HylaFAX gives you easy ability to do fax-on-demand and other services like that.
I also used a system with three 14.4k voicemodems and vgetty as a way of validating information on a system that required the user give their true phone number. User was e-mailed a code to punch in after storing their supposed phone number and that code in a database. The voice system would use caller id and compare the code they entered with the code matching that number in the database. Match? Voila! Flag is set, account is activated.
Worked great, client never used it though. C'est la vie.