We kick off 2017 with a new series on autonomous vehicles and, for the short term at least, the focus will be on Tesla simply because they’ve moved the needle the quickest and have a billion+ driver-tested miles under their belt already. I’m reminded of a quip from a pilot friend who said, "Anybody can fly a plane at 30,000 feet with autopilot. What separates the living from the dead is what you do when something goes wrong." A recent… Read More ›
[iframe-popup id="6″] Once a year we like to step back and survey the latest and greatest VoIP developments for the coming year. And 2016 was certainly filled with surprises including the release of free versions of 3CX sporting the PIAF5 and Elastix 5.0 monikers. That, in turn, produced a wave of FUD from our friends at Sangoma® urging users to return to their open source roots. But guess what? Sangoma was pitching their FreePBX Distro®, another closed source product just… Read More ›
WOW! When we started our 2016, The Year of (real) VoIP Choice series, little did we know everything that was about to unfold. It’s been an interesting last few months in the VoIP community with the introduction of PIAF5 and Elastix 5.0 and Ombutel and ThirdLane and this week’s XiVO fork to Wazo. But, stay calm. There is a bright light at the end of this tunnel. You now have MORE FREE VoIP PBX CHOICES than ever before. And every… 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 demonstrated with Siri™ just how amazing this technology could be by coupling Wolfram Alpha® to a speech-to-text engine on the iPhone about 5 years ago. And, thanks to Google’s new speech transcription engine and Wolfram Alpha’s API, you… Read More ›
UPDATE: Wazo 17.01 has been officially released. The complete tutorial is available here. And you thought the excitement was over for 2016. Well, not so fast. The core development team at XiVO has now forked the project so this will be the last XiVO-branded release until Wazo 16.16 hits the street. Nothing has changed except the name and a boatload of new features with more to come including a new GUI interface a little further down the road. And you’ll… Read More ›
Today we’re pleased to introduce our last (but not least) Unified Communications platform for 2016. Meet Ombutel, a terrific new GUI-based Asterisk® aggregation that was developed jointly by Telesoft and Xorcom, two familiar faces in the Asterisk community. We racked our brain trying to come up with a simple way to explain all of the things that Ombutel can do. We finally concluded "a picture [really] is worth a thousand words!" Here’s some additional background on the Ombutel project: As… Read More ›
Nov. 21 UPDATE: As rumored, RingPlus has now announced the termination of ALL existing plans. Details here. NEWS FLASH: We interrupt our normal editorial schedule to bring you this update. Many of our readers joined us in embracing RingPlus cellular service with the promise of free monthly calling in exchange for a modest upfront contribution. As with almost every something-for-nothing deal, it looks as if the death spiral may have begun with the abrupt termination of more than a dozen… Read More ›
It’s been a while since we provided a fresh look at Google Voice, Google SMS messaging, and Google’s Speech Recognition labyrinth which have been integral components of Incredible PBX for many years. For those living in the United States, here’s a soup-to-nuts tutorial to get all of the services deployed quickly on any Incredible PBX platform including XiVO and Elastix as well as on the new freeware releases of Ombutel and PBX in a Flash 5 powered by 3CX. On… Read More ›