Nerd Deals:

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 ›

An Open Letter to Google: Don't Do It!

An Open Letter to Google: Don’t Do It!

Saturday, May 12, 2018

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With an obscure post on its support forum, Google has quietly announced that it will discontinue Google Voice support for XMPP on June 18. According to Obihai1 insiders, it will be replaced with a Google-proprietary version of the SIP protocol to which only Obihai has been provided access despite claims from Google staff (without documentation) that the "new Google Voice" will be "standards-compliant" and "should work with many third party solutions." July 20 Update: Google did it anyway and pulled… Read More ›

Autonomous Cars: Move Over Tesla, Here Comes Everybody

Autonomous Cars: Move Over Tesla, Here Comes Everybody

Saturday, April 28, 2018

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It’s been about a year since our last Tesla® report card. And, wow, how the landscape has changed. For most of the year, Tesla has stumbled and bumbled through about a dozen updates. With each one, Tesla’s resident cheerleader, Electrek, has proclaimed that self-driving autonomy was "just around the corner." We’re still waiting although we’re writing this only because last month’s update finally achieved the milestone of being able to navigate the interstate highway in our own hometown without darting… Read More ›

VoiceMail Transcription for VitalPBX Using IBM Watson STT

VoiceMail Transcription for VitalPBX Using IBM Watson STT

Monday, April 23, 2018

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Our VitalPBX adventure resumes today with one of the most requested PBX features regardless of platform. VoiceMail Transcription simply means that recorded voicemail messages are transcribed using a speech-to-text (STT) engine before being delivered in both written and recorded formats via email. The good news is we’ll show you how to harness IBM Watson’s STT to do the heavy lifting. Their platform is hands-down the best in the industry. And today we’ll walk you through the 5-minute setup procedure for… Read More ›

Incredible PBX in the Cloud: A $10/Year VoIP Cloud Platform

Incredible PBX in the Cloud: A $10/Year VoIP Cloud Platform

Monday, April 16, 2018

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We’ve been inching toward a new low-cost plateau for VoIP cloud providers, and today we have a new milestone that finally makes running VoIP servers out of your home or office look like the horse-and-buggy days. $10 a year now buys you a cloud platform that is less expensive than the cost of electricity to run a server on premise. You get 2GB of RAM, 20GB of SSD storage, two virtual core processors, and 2TB of monthly bandwidth. If you… Read More ›

Introducing Digium's Awesome SIP Phones for Asterisk

Introducing Digium’s Awesome SIP Phones for Asterisk

Friday, April 13, 2018

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If you’ve been waiting for a low-cost, feature-rich SIP phone that meshes perfectly with your Asterisk® PBX, your prayers have been answered. Digium has just released not one, but four, new SIP phones with prices starting at $59. No, that’s not a typo. Digium gave us a couple of early models to play with, and today we’ll walk you through the incredibly simple setup. We would begin by noting that, despite the pricing, these phones are configured with nothing resembling… Read More ›

One Minute Wonder: Introducing VitalPBX for VirtualBox

One Minute Wonder: Introducing VitalPBX for VirtualBox

Monday, April 9, 2018

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Last week we took VitalPBX to the Cloud with our rock-solid firewall. And this week we’ll show you how to get VitalPBX up and running on any desktop computer in less than a minute using VirtualBox®. If you’ve followed Nerd Vittles over the years, you already know that VirtualBox from Oracle® is one of our favorite platforms. Almost any desktop computer can serve as a VirtualBox hosting platform. And once VirtualBox is installed, adding VitalPBX is a snap. Download the… Read More ›

VitalPBX in the Cloud: Providers, Backups, & Airtight Security

VitalPBX in the Cloud: Providers, Backups, & Airtight Security

Monday, April 2, 2018

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Last month we introduced VitalPBX, a terrific new (free) VoIP platform that’s about as intuitive as software can get. We followed up with a dozen Incredible PBX applications that really showed off the flexibility of this new Asterisk® platform. And today we’re pleased to introduce two new cloud solutions that offer our whitelist firewall design for security plus automatic backups. Both Digital Ocean and Vultr offer terrific performance coupled with a $5/month price point that is easy on your wallet.… Read More ›