We’ve all placed calls to support lines that keep you waiting on hold for what seems like an eternity. While some companies now offer a call back service that holds your place in the queue, many still do not. One of our users recently asked whether there was a simple way with Asterisk® to preserve your place in line without tying up your phone waiting for the other party to finally pick up the call. Here’s what we came up… Read More ›
We’ve lost count of the number of FreePBX® security breaches that were directly attributable to vulnerabilities in the FreePBX web interface. Suffice it to say, it was the reason that PBX in a Flash and Incredible PBX instituted the Travelin’ Man 3 firewall a decade ago hiding the FreePBX GUI from everyone except those on a whitelist controlled by the PBX administrator. More than a decade later, Sangoma® finally introduces Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with two major gotchas. First, you have… Read More ›
Over the years, we’ve covered numerous commercial and free text-to-speech (TTS) offerings for Asterisk® including gTTS, PicoTTS, Amazon’s Polly TTS, IBM TTS, Google TTS, FLITE, and Festival. But SpeechGen’s commercial offering sets it apart both in terms of quality and cost. At a $9.99 price point for 100,000 characters with an easy-to-deploy AGI interface, SpeechGen is almost a perfect fit for Asterisk TTS applications. If you decide to deploy SpeechGen after trying out our demo, we hope you’ll consider using… Read More ›
We enjoy some infrequent entertainment reading the latest Reddit posts about Incredible PBX®. The comments range from "stealing FreePBX®" to "they move too fast" to "there are too many add-ons, only some of which I use." Most of the naysayers, of course, post anonymously. From the general tenor, it’s pretty simple to conclude that most of these folks have little clue about how open source development works much less any understanding of GPL licensing. Others are probably affiliated with competitors.… Read More ›
If you’re a history buff and want a convenient way to find out everything that ever happened Today in History, then this week’s upgraded text to speech (TTS) application for Asterisk® should be just what you need. Pick up any phone connected to your Asterisk system and dial T-O-D-A-Y (86329 for the spelling-impaired). The script will retrieve today’s historical events of interest from HistoryOrb.com and play the results back to you over the phone using last week’s gTTS engine update.… Read More ›
Telephony is all about person-to-person communications. But much of what we do in the real world involves gathering information from non-human sources. These include books, magazines, and newspapers as well as sources that provide real-time news, weather, sports scores, stock quotes, inventory and personnel data, reservation systems, and historical data from countless other sources. No modern phone system would be complete without providing an interface to this data and for that you’ll need a text-to-speech engine (TTS). We previously have… Read More ›
Ever wished your Asterisk® server could harness the power of a 10,000 CPU Supercomputer to answer virtually any question you can dream up about the world we live in? Well, so long as it’s for non-commercial use, today’s your lucky day. Apple’s Siri™ and Amazon’s Alexa™ demonstrated just how amazing this technology can be. It began by coupling Wolfram Alpha® to a speech-to-text engine on the iPhone 4S. And now, thanks to IBM’s new speech transcription engine and Wolfram Alpha’s… Read More ›
It’s been several years since we introduced our Call By Name script for Asterisk® using IBM’s Voice Recognition software. During that time, IBM has shifted gears on their pricing plans and their API methodology several times. So today we want to provide a new soup-to-nuts tutorial for those using Incredible PBX on the Raspberry Pi and Incredible PBX 2021 on both the Debian 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 platforms. If you have previously used IBM voice recognition (STT), be aware that… Read More ›