Recognizing touch tones

[Bill Mullen]

On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, Bob Bell wrote:

>     Someone has approached me about writing some software that would
> basically provide a phone menu.  It would recognize touch tones (phone
> button presses), gather information, provide voice prompts, and take
> action based upon the information entered.  Any idea what it would take
> to accomplish this?  I'm pretty sure I could record WAVs/MP3s/etc for
> the voice prompts and such, but the biggest question for me is around
> the use of the phone.  Specifically:
>     1) How do I respond to incoming calls?
>     2) How do I get an audio file to play into the telephone?
>     3) How do I recognize touch tones as input?
> 
>     Obviously, I'm asking because I would expect to use Linux as the OS
> on which I develop a solution.  Does anyone know how to accomplish these
> things?  Perhaps there's an Open Source package that has a number of
> these features?

Check out http://www.vocpsystem.com for one.

It uses vgetty (a.k.a. mgetty-voice) as the backend to handle the voice
modem(s), and is written in Perl. I've been testing it lately, and IMHO
it's getting very capable; it can already handle your stated needs, and is
designed to be integratable with the Festival package to provide some
text-to-speech functionality as well. With the right modem, it sets up 
relatively easily, and the documentation is quite good.

The mailing list is active, and the lead programmer, Pat Deegan, is very 
receptive to suggestions and bug reports. While he has primarily focused 
on creating a voicemail/fax system, he has included the ability to execute 
scripts, and is always looking for new ideas for uses of this feature.

Another reasonably mature project in this arena is Asterisk PBX (found at 
http://www.asterisk.org); it uses telephony cards rather than modems, and 
while significantly more challenging to set up, is also more versatile - 
but is probably overkill for your situation, unless you expect to be 
handling many simultaneous calls.

-- 
Bill Mullen   moon at lunarhub.com   MA, USA   RLU #270075   MDK 8.1 & 9.0
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