in Telephony

are you also evolvolving?


(The above is a hilarious typo in the website for VON Canada.)

This month’s Toronto Asterisk Users’ Group meeting was held at the Voice on the Net Canada 2006 conference. Given the audience (business users and implementers of largely commercial telecommunications equipment) Asterisk was probably a new concept to them, which meant that some of the presentations at TAUG were aimed at an entry-level audience.

Still, there were some really cool Asterisk add-ons demonstrated. One such patch was the Asterisk Real-Time Voice Changer, which lets you alter the pitch of your voice in real-time. It’s great fun for pretending to be a secret informant. Claude Patry, one of the developers of the patch, noted that if you have access to the Asterisk CLI, you can even do this to someone else’s voice call in progress — a very evil use, to be sure, but a great way to get back at your co-workers that piss you off.

Iotum demonstrated their “relevance engine”, whch is basically a rules-based engine for determining priority and subsequent routing of incoming voice calls — so for example, if my girlfriend called me, I could get alerted over instant messenger, but lower-priority folks would get shunted to voicemail. Of course this is a trivial example, as the rules taken into account could also be things like “do I have a meeting scheduled with this caller later in the day”, or “I’m expecting a call from such-and-such a person today”.

I’ll probably be reinstalling my Asterisk@Home system with a regular Asterisk installation sometime soon, so I can get a better idea about how things are all put together.

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