Is there a simple, easy to use, low cost GUI-driven answering machine project available for Asterisk that can store tens of thousands of phone messages?
I know someone who seems to think every phone message they get is “important” so they rarely delete anything. There are years-old messages from people who’ve died, messages from distant friends who called for special events, etc. Meanwhile the actual recording time available is often 30 seconds or less, and deleting messages is an angst-ridden anguishing event for them.
No commercial basic landline answering machine seems to offer more than 15 minutes of recording time, and I have yet to find one that offers removable flash like an SD card slot.
At this point I am preparing to set up an old Windows XP laptop with a 120 gig SSD and a generic USB voice modem, running a $40 Windows answering machine software that I know can store thousands of messages… and kept off the Internet so nobody can attack the old OS.
But I’m also wondering if there’s a way to do this via Ubuntu and Asterisk, so that I can still update the OS on the old laptop over time, without having to fork out for Windows 7/8/9 as the years go by. (Expected usage timeframe is 30+ years, only replacing the hardware when it fails in some manner.)
I have zero experience with Asterisk, and only know about it from discussions I’ve had with other people on this topic over at DSLReports: dslreports.com/forum/r293595 … -messages-
Is there an easy way to set up a simple GUI-driven answering machine using Asterisk and Ubuntu, on a 7-year old old 2ghz 32-bit laptop with 2gb of memory, using a generic USB voice modem?
No need for multiple mailboxes or menu options, just:
[ul]
[li] a single outgoing message
[/li][li] a single scrolling list containing all received messages, going back years
[/li][li] newest messages at the top of the list
[/li][li] caller-ID support
[/li][li] a Notes field if someone wants to add notes about what a call was about
[/li][li] ability to column-sort messages by Date, Number, Called ID, or Notes field
[/li][li] some sort of “Search by” to find old messages[/li][/ul]
No command-lines wanted. This needs to be simple enough that my non-tech-savvy 70yr old father can even use it.