How do I get my computer to call my phone and play a sound file?

June 16, 2007 11:52 PM

How do I get my computer to call my phone and play a sound file?

I'm looking for a (free) way to programmatically have my computer call my no-frills phone and play some audio file.

I've heard that there are existing apache modules that will handle pc to phone interfacing but haven't had any luck finding what I need. Preferably, I would be able to use some scripting language like Python or Perl to interface with the technology. Alas, it also should be Windows-compatible.

Sorry for the lack of detail: I'm a fairly experienced programmer, but this is unfamiliar territory for me.

Thanks for your help!

posted by TimeTravelSpeed to technology (8 comments total)

How do you plan to connect your computer to the telephone network?
posted by jjg at 1:00 AM on June 17, 2007

I was initially going to suggest that old-school dial-up modems could often act as soundcards, allowing you to tell the modem to dial a number, then play a sound through it.

However, I assume the modem would be sitting on the line you're trying to call in to? If so, clearly that won't work.

I assume, then, you want some kind of VOIP system. Have you seen Asterisk?
posted by Jimbob at 3:15 AM on June 17, 2007

Maybe you can use Skype to have your computer call your phone, and then play a sound file? It'll cost you, but only 1-2 cents a minute, so that's do able. I think that would be the easiest way.
posted by jayden at 4:03 AM on June 17, 2007

If you're looking to crib code/specs for a roll-your-own solution, or are willing to jump to *IX, the Vgetty suite is software for running POTS voicemodems - Can't speak to the current state of the software, but it was pretty rough when I tried it in the mid-90's.
posted by Orb2069 at 4:46 AM on June 17, 2007

Couldn't you just SMS your phone and attach a audio file to the SMS notification on your phone?
posted by purephase at 7:03 AM on June 17, 2007

The asterisk package can work with winmodems'-- Astwind uses colinux to work with windows. There seems to be a windows port [here], but it looks questionable.
posted by acro at 8:42 AM on June 17, 2007

Jimbob -- I had originally considered using a modem, but then I realized we don't even have a land-line: everyone in the house is mobile; I'm pretty much forced to use VoIP.

purephase -- I could do that, but I want to avoid incurring the cost of a text, and also have it work on land lines.

acro -- I had seen a little asterisk stuff in my googling, but was turned off by the non-windows. But the windows-compatible solutions look promising! Thanks!
posted by TimeTravelSpeed at 9:16 AM on June 17, 2007

A few years ago I used to do speech programming and VoiceXML development.

Get a free developer account with BeVocal, and learn a little about VoiceXML. It's really quite easy to use if you have any programming knowledge.

They have a SOAP API that you can submit a request to and the BeVocal system will call the phone number that you specify in the request and serve up the VXML pages and will also allow you to do speech recognition and text to speech.

All you have to have on your computer is some sort of web server that can serve up text files (apache would work fine for this, or tomcat/rails/php etc if you need dynamic stuff).

It can also serve up pre-recorded audo files (though it's fairly picky about the bitrates and encoding, they mention what they accept in the documentation).

With a developer account, you can do all this stuff for free as long as your volume is relatively low. I've made a number of sample apps that call my phone for free.
posted by freshgroundpepper at 11:31 AM on June 17, 2007 [2 favorites]