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 ›
#FollowFriday seemed an appropriate day to introduce Mastodon, our decentralized solution to the Twitter meltdown. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple weeks, here’s a quick snapshot. Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44 billion. Elon fires half of existing Twitter staff. Elon bans Twitter employees from working at home. Elon, the Free Speech champion, fires Twitter employees that criticize his misleading tweeets. Elon gives remaining Twitter employees an ultimatum to sign a pledge to work under… 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 ›
Don’t ask me why, but sometimes you just get the urge to try something new even though you expect to encounter a few land mines. Boy, did we. After Red Hat dropped support for the CentOS clone we all knew and loved, Rocky and AlmaLinux sprung to the rescue. While our Rocky 8 release has been well received, we never explored AlmaLinux until they announced the release of AlmaLinux 9, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 introduced in… Read More ›
If you’re new to the VoIP world and want to kick the tires to see what you’re missing, then today’s one minute setup is for you. You’ll get a $10 credit to try out some penny-a-minute calls and to purchase a $1 a month phone number in your choice of area codes. If you decide VoIP is not for you, you don’t have to buy anything ever. And you can use almost any desktop computer you already own to bring… Read More ›
We’ve been on a roll since March Madness by adding Rocky 8 to the Incredible PBX® portfolio. In addition to a native installer, we also added a VirtualBox image, a 5-minute CrownCloud setup, an amazing cloud-based platform for just $25 a year, and an experimental Debian 11, Asterisk 19, and FreePBX 16 platform. Now that fall is just around the corner, we have tweaked our three new Incredible PBX offerings: Debian 11, Asterisk® 19, and FreePBX® 16. So, if you… 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 ›