Asterisk-Java

I will give a short presentation of Asterisk-Java (in German) at the Java User Group Cologne (JUGC) on May 29th. It will be a short overview of what Asterisk-Java can do and how it can be used to add phone … Continue reading →

I will give a short presentation of Asterisk-Java (in German) at the Java User Group Cologne (JUGC) on May 29th. It will be a short overview of what Asterisk-Java can do and how it can be used to add phone support to Java applications. The ... [More] presentation will have a duration of 5 to 10 minutes and include a small interactive demo that serves as a show case. The main talk will be about JSF 2.0 vs Struts 2.1. I would be happy to meet a few Asterisk-Java developers over there. [Less]

Sameh Shaker has posted some examples of what you can do with Asterisk using the Manager API and Fast AGI. I think it's a good starting point for new users of Asterisk-Java to get some inspiration for their own applications. References Sameh Shaker: Asterisk and CTI, what’s that all about?

The latest snapshot of Asterisk-Java contains support for the Asterisk Speech API. This makes writing AGI script that recognize speech as easy as writing AGI scripts for DTMF input. All you need to get started is a recent version of Asterisk ... [More] 1.6 and the Lumenvox Speech Engine. For development you can buy a starter kit from Digium for 50 USD. In your AGI script you initialize the speech engine, load and activate a grammer and are ready to recognize speech. The speechRecognize() method takes a voice prompt as its first parameter. The prompt is played to the user and the users response is recognized. The user doesn't have to wait for the prompt to finish, he can start talking right away ("barge in"). The corresponding Java code looks like this: speechCreate(); speechLoadGrammar("digits", grammarPath); speechActivateGrammar("digits"); SpeechRecognitionResult result = speechRecognize("speech-demo/prompt", 10); speechDeactivateGrammar(grammarLabel); The SpeechRecognitionResult provided by Asterisk-Java contains the result and the confidence score – a value between 0 and 1000 that indicates how sure the speech engine is that the result is correct. The Java code to evaluate the result looks like this: if (result.isSpeech()) { if (result.getScore() > 990) { streamFile("speech-demo/absolutely-sure"); } else if (result.getScore() > 800) { streamFile("speech-demo/pretty-sure"); } else { streamFile("speech-demo/not-sure"); } // say what we have recognized sayDigits(result.getText()); } Finally call speechDestory to end the speech recognition session: speechDestroy(); Pretty easy, isn't it? You can have a look at the SpeechDemo AGI script or download the full demo that includes the latest snapshot of Asterisk-Java, the voice prompts and the AGI script. [Less]

OpenNMS is an open source network management platform developed on the Java platform. It offers monitoring for a wide range of network devices and services. As Asterisk becomes an important part of today's network infrastructure it becomes more ... [More] important to be able to monitor it for outages and resource usage. Jeff Gehlbach of The OpenNMS Group is the de facto maintainer of res_snmp and is working on improved monitoring for Asterisk with OpenNMS. His slides from a recent talk in Frankfurt provide a good overview of the effort. In addition to monitoring Asterisk Jeff has also added support to send OpenNMS notification through Asterisk. This allows staff to be notified by a phone call of any outages in the network. The notification module is based on Asterisk-Java and uses the originate feature of the Manager API along with a custom AGI script that reads the notice details. Jeff has made a screencast that shows it in action. If you are interested in the details have a look at his strategy class for originating calls and the AGI script that reads some of the notice details. Along with a few properties for configuration this makes a good example on how to integrate Asterisk into your applications with Asterisk-Java. References OpenNMS homepage Jeff's slides on OpenNMS and Asterisk Jeff's screencast on OpenNMS Asterisk Notifications [Less]

Tim Panton recently announced that Mexuar has released their Correlata SDK under the terms of GPLv3. It is available for download at http://www.mexuar.com/files/corraleta_sdk.rar. Correlata SDK is a pure Java implementation of the IAX2 protocol. ... [More] It includes an applet that can be accessed via JavaScript which makes it useful as a softphone embedded into web pages. In contrast to SIP IAX2 is firewall and NAT friendly. To use the code you have to compile the sources and create a jar file. Then you have to sign it to allow the applet to access the microphone. Finally you'll setup a web page with the applet and add some JavaScript. You can have a look at the source code of the Mexuar homepage to see an example. Though Mexuar has published the source code under GPL the download only contains the plain Java sources. There is no documentation except for JavaDoc, no build script and no sample code. The link to the download is quite hidden on their website. While Mexuar offers paid support, licenses and manged hosting there doesn't seem to be an Open Source community around it yet. Tim suggested to set up a project on Sourceforge or Google Code to build one. However due to his former relationship with Mexuar he prefers not be the project lead. I think the code is a great complement to Asterisk-Java and will be very useful for a lot of applications. If you are also interested in giving it a good home and add some polish feel free to comment on this posting or discuss it on our mailing list. References Download Source Code [Less]

Justin Grammens has published a great overview of using Asterisk and Groovy with Asterisk-Java showing some real-worl examples. The presentation is also available from SlideShare. You might also want to have a look at Justin's blog Localtone. ... [More] You'll find lots of information on Asterisk, Ruby and Groovy including the Ruby framework Adhearsion and some screencasts. I recommend his screencast on how to setup Asterisk to any Java or Ruby developer who wants to get started with VoIP and Asterisk. [Less]

Zimbra is an open source groupware product for messaging and collaboration. Its core is implemented in Java and provides extension points for custom plugins so called Zimlets. Swiss company BNC has developed a Zimlet to connect Asterisk to Zimbra ... [More] using Asterisk-Java. The Asterisk PBX Integration Zimlet is available from Sourceforge under the terms of the GPL. Features include Dial on-click in Contacts and Emails Sending SMS trough Asterisk's SMS application Inbound call notification References Zimbra Collaboration Suite Asterisk PBX Integration Zimlet [Less]

Sajid Moinuddin has blogged about using Asterisk-Java with Spring. His article shows how to implement a BeanNameAwareAGIMappingStrategy that automatically maps AGI URLs to Spring beans without any additional configuration. References: Sajid Moinuddin: Asterisk-Java and Spring

As far as I know, no one has yet succeeded to deliver a high quality open source package for the thousands of small and medium sized call centers around the globe that want to go Asterisk. But having to buy proprietary software for managing the ... [More] call center, or having to build their own software, seemed up to now the only two available options. AACC was conceived to fulfill the need of those call centers, and make an impact in call centers similar to the one Asterisk has made in telephony. Now, that’s setting a pretty high mark for ourselves, so, how will we do it? First of all, we have tried very hard to understand what those small and medium sized call centers need and want. So we are designing a system which is feature rich, yet easy to manage, agile, and extensible. We didn’t set up to reinvent the wheel. So we try to take advantage of other open source projects out there that do what they do very well. One of those projects is Asterisk-Java, on which we rely to communicate back and forth with Asterisk. Then we said to ourselves, "Let’s go visual!" But let’s not go exactly mainstream. So we ruled out resource-hungry web based solutions, AJAX, and other technologies, and chose to use industry proven Java technology, both for our clients as well as for our servers. Agents will have a toolbar – a specialized CRM from which they will be able to see and update call information, see a script for the campaign, or have it do an automatic screen pop. Administrators will have a control panel from which they will manage all aspects of the call center with ease. And they can chose to go Linux, or to go Windows, or… Mac? Doesn’t matter, AACC is built with Java, so it’s OS independent. The response from the developers’ community was overwhelming, surpassing all of our expectations. We even had the luxury of turning down candidates! We are working right now on several fronts. AACC will be suitable both for inbound as well as for outbound call centers. So we’re designing a predictive dialer, which will be able to handle multiple campaigns for multiple customers, with customizable information such as products offered, and per-campaign custom data, sales scripts, and call disposition. Reporting is key. We are creating additional reporting information to what Asterisk provides, both for realtime and historical statistics. We're also incorporating JasperReports for stunning on-screen reporting, as well as saving the reports in the most relevant file formats, like PDF, RTF, ODT, HTML, XLS, and others. Reporting will of course be extensible, meaning that you will be able to design your own reports – with a WYSIWYG tool, also open source – in addition to the reports you will get out-of-the-box. Last, but not least, AACC will be fully localizable. We hope that once initial development stage is over, we can be joined by translators who will help us localize the application to many languages. When, you would ask, will this be production ready? We believe an alpha (i.e. not yet ready for production) version will be available before Christmas 2008. A beta version should be ready not long after that. I’ll keep you posted! Make sure you join our users list and visit our site at http://hanashidialer.sourceforge.net for more information about this project. [Less]