Raspberry Pi

Spam Phone Call Blocker and CNAM Caching for FreePBX

Spam Phone Call Blocker and CNAM Caching for FreePBX

Monday, November 26, 2018

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Blocking spam phone calls has been a challenge to put it charitably. Thanks to some earlier work by Stewart Nelson on the DSLR forum as well as Stewart’s considerable hand-holding in the development of today’s tutorial, we want to introduce a new approach to blocking these calls. The way it works is first time callers that pass the TrueCNAM SPAM check will be prompted to "press 5 to connect." Since most spam calls sit in a queue for several seconds… Read More ›

Free Asterisk Voicemail Transcription with IBM Watson STT

Free Asterisk Voicemail Transcription with IBM Watson STT

Monday, November 12, 2018

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There are many commercial voicemail transcription services for Asterisk® PBXs, but none hold a candle to the speech-to-text (STT) quality of the IBM Cloud offering known as Watson® STT, formerly known as Bluemix TTS. Despite a recent price increase that takes effect in December, the pricing remains competitive. On the Standard Pricing Plan, voicemail transcription is 2¢ per minute. Or you can try things out on the LITE plan which offers 100 minutes a month at no cost. When the… Read More ›

Double-NAT Blues: Tackling Asterisk's Thorniest Problems

Double-NAT Blues: Tackling Asterisk’s Thorniest Problems

Monday, August 20, 2018

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Whether you’re new to VoIP technology or an Old Timer, nothing is quite as frustrating as wrestling with one-way audio and no audio on SIP calls either because of poorly designed NAT-based routers or poorly implemented SIP ALG solutions on low-end residential routers. To make matters worse, you get to deal with calls originating behind not one, but two, NAT-based routers neither of which complies with the basic SIP Rules of the Road. In a perfect world, SIP and RTP… Read More ›

Introducing the GPL Toolkit for FreePBX and Incredible PBX

Introducing the GPL Toolkit for FreePBX and Incredible PBX

Friday, August 17, 2018

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We’ve been scratching our head for a good way to commemorate Micro$oft’s $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub which has served as the linchpin of the open source development community for many years. We’ll leave it to others and history to judge whether this was a good idea or not. What we came up with was a GPL Toolkit for Incredible PBX 13-13 that makes it child’s play to upgrade FreePBX® GPL modules in our Incredible PBX® 13-13 offerings for CentOS/SL,… Read More ›

VoIP 101: Developing a Cost-Effective SIP Strategy

VoIP 101: Developing a Cost-Effective SIP Strategy

Monday, June 11, 2018

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In the lead up to the demise of Google Voice XMPP service next week, we wanted to offer what we have found to be a cost-effective SIP strategy which takes advantage of the best of all worlds. We would divide SIP offerings into five broad categories: business-class unlimited SIP trunks, Old Faithful SIP providers, Mom-and-Pop SIP services, dirt-cheap termination services, and Gee Whiz SIP providers. As we have said many times, the beauty of setting up an Asterisk® PBX such… Read More ›

Some Fresh CallerID Magic for Incredible PBX 13-13

Some Fresh CallerID Magic for Incredible PBX 13-13

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

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It’s been more than 10 years since we first introduced CallerID Trifecta for Asterisk® and the FreePBX® platform. A few months later it morphed into CallerID Superfecta and, as they say, the rest is history. Today CallerID Superfecta is used by over a million people around the globe to obtain CallerID Name (CNAM) information from over 70 different lookup sources. WOW! Just call me the Proud Papa. What a journey it has been, and our special thanks to the dozens… Read More ›

Dare to Compare: The Best (free) VoIP Offerings for 2018

Dare to Compare: The Best (free) VoIP Offerings for 2018

Sunday, May 27, 2018

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Last week we showed you how to get 10 months of free hosting for your Incredible PBX® in the Cloud. And today we present our semi-annual survey of the latest and greatest VoIP offerings for 2018. The beauty of the cloud platform is you can try all of them for less than a penny an hour and decide for yourself which free offering best meets your needs. This year we’ve ushered in new Asterisk® 13 LTS releases of Incredible PBX®… Read More ›

Creating an OBi200 Google Voice Trunk to Use with Asterisk

Creating an OBi200 Google Voice Trunk to Use with Asterisk

Monday, May 14, 2018

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Since Asterisk® will no longer be able to "talk" to Google Voice after June 17, we promised to hold our nose and document how to salvage your Google Voice trunks. Our exercise for today is to show you how to deploy an OBi 200-series device which can speak the new Google Voice language and use it as a traditional SIP bridge between Google Voice’s proprietary SIP platform and your Asterisk server. We will skip the editorializing on why Google is… Read More ›