I've just arrived at Emerging Telephony. Today various workshops and discussions are happening, tomorrow the conference formally starts. I've ducked in to an Asterisk hacks session. Not sure what I'll find. What I'm seeking is a sense of how adventuous the Asterisk community is and where they are going. There is a good crowd already here. I'd guess O'Reilly will be very happy with 1st show attendance. In the end I'm not sure how much I really learned from this session.

The session moderator is introducing this session on Asterisk, VoIP, and other great hacks. He says telecom has been an adjunct to the systems in the company. Stop thinking about it like a telephone. Let's take a look at what is possible. [Ed: spelling correction. The soft PBX is spelled Asterisk, whereas Asterix refers to the pint sized Gaul of comic book fame.]

This is introduced by Steven Mueller (Sun Labs), who begins talking about the idea of auto provisioning. He descibes it as an easy method to get a new telephones / handsets online and into the Sun network. I'd expect that auto provisioning is automatic. Unfortunately his story shows things are not as simple as this. In this system it is important to be able to update the phone from the center. I can't help but thinking this method is obsolete. The validation system used is likely to be confusing to users. It's obvious that a find me follow me solution would be preferred by users. Summary he's done a neat hack that adds flexibility to his traditional VoIP system and simplifies provisioning. Still I can't help thinking that "softphone" based systems have to end up cheaper.

Christian AstLinux embedded distribution for running Asterix. Allows you to experiment with Asterisk and Linux without leaving your current operating system. Looking on the site it appear this provides a very small footprint and could be run off a USB stick. Still he's talking another language for me. I've had a few pointers recently pointing me to Asterisk options. I'm certainly considering a little "learning by doing" project.

Simon Ditner from Toronto has taken the game Zork and added speech recognition to it. It's been done with Asterisk. It's a fun demo, still complete with bugs. He's using Sphinx2 for the voice recognition portion. There's a good debate on whether there is a commercial application for this. It looks like a wonderful way to me to create a new type of game genre. The mobile operators would love the minutes used online --- talking to a game! Nice.

Raph is taking about Clicktodial, something that I've integrated into my Firefox browser. It just adds a hyperlink to phone numbers on any page and then your skype client or another phone can be set to dial. In this case he has hooked it to SunRocket. He also demonstrates how to do it to any phone number on your desktop. For Skypers using Skylook or the Skype Outlook plug-in this functionality is already common place. It's certainly convenient and it helps the user understanding in merging the computer and telephony.

Ted Wallingford was going to do a presenation on Skype as an attempt. He is not online. Interestingly the moderator has only just today downloaded Skype. That tells me something. I wonder how many more in the audience are like this? Apparently no one from Skype is presenting here. I don't know if anyone from Skype is attending. I think Skype missed an opportunity. They should be here.

Tag : etel