Ivr features required for medical dictation

Greetings. I raised this question early on in my development but was not sure how to followup. Basically I have encountered two features missing in Asterisk that would be very useful in an application such as a cloud based dictation system.

First, when app.record is set to exit on “any” key, it should have a way of returning what that key that was pressed was, so the ivr application can immediately act on that request without having to re-prompt for the next action.

I’m not very good in the asterisk code but I do something like this:


} else if ((f->frametype == AST_FRAME_DTMF) &&
((f->subclass.integer == terminator) ||
(ast_test_flag(&flags, OPTION_ANY_TERMINATE)))) {

	        /* BEGIN NEW CODE -- avmar   */
		temp_record_exitkey[0] = f->subclass.integer;
		temp_record_exitkey[1] = '\0';
		pbx_builtin_setvar_helper(chan, "RECORD_EXITKEY", temp_record_exitkey);
		/* END NEW CODE -- avmar   */

which “seems” to work but it requires me to recompile a special version of asterisk and keeps me from being able to use cloud based asterisk providers because they would not have this kind of a patch in their record app.

The second feature also involves the app.record and this one I have not found a workaround for and it is very important. Most medical dictation systems will play a brief, low volume, high pitched beep every 10 seconds or so during recording so the caller can tell that they have not be disconnected, or paused… and then continue recording into a dead line. This can cause great excitement later when the person eventually transcribing the recording hears only silence or only seconds of recording instead of possibly minutes.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to get these features available in future builds of asterisk? I use the latest build of Asterisk 11

I would be glad to visit with anyone wishing to discuss how i am getting around the record exit key issue and possible solutions to the recording notification beep.

I’m very impressed and pleased with the asterisk project. I have been able to reproduce a fairly feature complete medical dictation system from scratch using only dialplan as a language. :smiley:

Thanks
Steve Keller (avmar)
n337cd@gmail.com
316-990-9955