We have a Windows software product that is running on PC’s connected to the Internet in remote locations all over the country. When certain conditions occur (freeze, smoke, heat etc) our system will automatically send an email or text message to alert our customers via the net.
We would also like to send a voice message to their phone. We are hoping to to install software in each location that can be triggered by our product to make a phone call (almost always local calls) and play a recorded message. We are OK if 100% of calls are not successful-we will also be sending other messages. We would rather not try to build a centralized messaging center. We are hoping we can use voip so that the same Internet connection could be utilized without needing to install phone lines and/or to buy equipment to connect our computer to the phone system.
Can this be done? Is it crazy expensive?
Steve
no, should be quite easy…
you’d need a way to initiate the call in asterisk, and you could do so via the manager interface or via call files.
for instance, if i had a monitoring script running and it triggered, i’d probably connect via a socket to asterisk and initiate a call - you could even set up the system to where a text file generated by your monitoring app could be read back by the phone system.
most of the work would be in setting up your application to connect to asterisk, the dial plan itself is fairly trivial.
as for sending the call over your existing network connection, that’s cake. you could utilize an ITSP, or route all calls out through a central phone server (the remote locations would connect to main server) or just have ONE central server that receives the alerts from all remote locations and routes the calls from there!
post more details if you want, i’m sure somebody on here can whip up what you need in no time.
In fact you can use the text to speech function to read the warning via the phone line. We are testing something like that.
Steve - I developed an application that allows you to post directly to a URL and send the message as a voice message to a phone. Example:
group2call.com/post/sendmess … ssage=This is a message.
“This is a test message” is converted to voice and sent to all the contacts in the group “group” and then will send a copy of the message as SMS AND email. I wrote this app in asterisk. The voice conversion is done using AT&T’s natural speech which is MUCH better than the asterisk conversion. Try it out for yourself. Send me a PM and I’ll set you up.