Replacing Orange's Wildfire with Asterisk? 25
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?"
Yeah,, I got one (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Altigen (Score:4, Interesting)
We use Altigen as our PBX and it does what you ask. I can give it a list of numbers to try me at when someone calls, and the caller will have the option to do so, or to leave me a message. It can be set to this "One Number Access" according to a schedule. It can email your voice messages, call you with voice messages or serve your voice messages through its client software or a web interface.
Plus all the usual PBX stuff. It ain't cheap, but it's not as expensive as a traditional system. I would imagine that Asterisk can do most of this, but I have no experience with it.
Re:Altigen (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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My love/hate with sphinx (Score:2)
Why try numbers when your computer can *know*? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=78 [nerdvittles.com]
-ben
Problems w/ Asterisk (Score:2)
Other than that, we haven't had any problems not related to in house stupidity.
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Asterisk wasn't properly setup for the channel bank ( Rhino, IIRC )
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I'll pass that on to the guy in charge of it.
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I run a Wildfire Server in the US (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Are they still available for sale commercially?
Dean
Keep Using Wildfire (Score:3, Informative)
Cretins (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Actually it's run by France Telecom, but it amounts to much the same thing.