Linux answering machine?
Someone came in the other day - well, it was probably a week or two now - asking about a “Linux answering machine”.
Turned out he had a Windows machine with a 56k modem attached, which was operating as an answering machine. I knew those modems were supposed to be “voice capable” but this is the first time I’d ever heard of anyone actually using this (except as a gimmick). He wanted to get rid of Windows entirely since his main machine was running Xandros.
My first thought was of Asterisk, which has got a lot of good press recently and has an active development community. However even Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@home) doesn’t scale down as far as a voice modem! I was also vaguely aware of vgetty, but one look at the documentation and it’s obviously techie territory.
Then I stumbled across VOCP. It looked like a perfect match - except that getting hold of it wasn’t going to be as simple as apt-get install vocp and this guy didn’t strike me has having the computer background needed to grasp all this quickly. Still, there is a lot of information on the site and the application looks pretty comprehensive.
This did lead me to wonder if I could explore Asterisk myself sometime. At home we don’t have a regular phone line from Telecom NZ, but a VOIP-based system from ihug. Theoretically we should be able to replace the little white-box-with-blinking-lights that our phones plug into with a Linux box running Asterisk, yet keep the benefits of a “real phone number”, whatever that is.
In reality this is a lot more tempting than it should be. We’ve had trouble with the reliability of ihug’s voicemail system, and the call quality isn’t tops (possibly due to the distance between us and the transmitter on Auckland’s sky tower), and despite us asking repeatedly, we still aren’t listed in the telephone book/white pages. Considering our 5-years-going-on-13 daughter’s affinity for the telephone, getting additional voice capacity through VOIP, that we manage ourselves seems .. interesting.
I don’t know if all the pieces are properly there yet, and besides, the reliability of that little white box far exceeds anything I can put together on a budget. Also, with ihug up for sale, and the not-unrelated issue of NZ local-loop unbundling and the promise of naked DSL, it might be wise to wait before committing to anything. And I’m not looking forward to dealing with the ihug helpdesk when things go wrong..
Two updates: there’s a succinct article on the WLUG site about using vgetty to answer the phone. If you’re interested and don’t like VOCP, this might be helpful.
Also since I wrote this article ihug announced they’re going to do voice again[PDF], and the news is that Vodafone have purchased ihug, which answers that question. Also .
Oh, and our ihug voicemail system is still faulty <sigh>.
Comment by walter — October 11, 2006 @ 3:51 pm