Is there a way to monitor (listen to) multiple calls at the same time in real time? For example I would like to hear what multiple employees are saying in seperate calls. Is this possible using asterisk?
As an alternative, does anyone know of any softphones with multiple line support that allow one to listen (not speak) to multiple lines at the same time?
Yes, this is possible, but you might want to check your local laws before, regarding privacybreech and telecommincation acts.
Here in germany it is not allowed to listen to calls without NOTIFYING the persons before.
There are no privacy concerns in this case. We are performing a training exercise and would like the ability to monitor any and trainee at any time. The trainees know they are being listen to. I am not sure how one would go about being able to listen to multiple calls at the same time though. Any ideas?
There are more solutions, but i need more infos:
a) Are the testcalls REAL calls from outisde ?
b) What technology is used ?
And i wonder how you will listen to “multiple calls” the same time, following 2 people talking (not to/with each other) is already hard 
How many monitoring-people are going to listen ?
Please dont get me wrong buddy, i dont want to post here in public all the ways to “sniff” calls - some readers might get nasty thoughts…
Privacy is a word in big letters to me, as an admin controling mailservers, pbx and terminalservers with private directorys etc.
I hope you understand.
Thanks for the time and help. I understand your concerns about posting sniffing details. We were hoping to find a solution using existing technology without resorting to crafting our own sniffing and reconstruction software.
The idea is that we are performing training exercise using modeling and simulation. Part of what we are training is how people use their comminication devices throughout the simulation. Each user will have their own computer with a softphone on it as well as different views into the simulation. We wish to be able to simulate their comminication network using voip. This is all done on a LAN. Each soft phone (using sip right now) is connected through Astersik as a proxy. This all works great except for the fact that we also need to be able to monitor in realtime what people are doing and saying so we can control the simulation appropriately. We would also like to replay key pieces of conversations aftwerwords for educational purposes.
We may have 1-3 stations that will need to monitor all calls. There really shoudn’t be too many people talking at the same time so I dont see that as too big of a problem.
I see that asterisk allows a person to barge (ZapBarge) in on a single call. I was curious if anyone knows a way to barge in on multiple calls at the same time.
There are also several existing programs that allow the recording of calls. I am having trouble finding ones that allow you to listen or switch between mutiple calls in real time.
Also, if you know of any software that allows one to connect to and listen to multiple conference calls or regular calls at the same time that would be great. I was trying to do this with a multi-line phone and didn’t have much success. You could only listen to one call as a time. This seems like a silly limitation.
Thanks for any help.