Just like 1-800-I-FEEL-OK

July 26, 2006 3:59 PM

Scriptable multiline voice menu system for a one-day event. Does anyone offer this service?

I'm looking for a way to set up a phone number that people can call in, type in a PIN, and then press various touch tone buttons to do various things through a set of scripts. There will be no live operators.

I am a competent programmer, and would want to provide all my own audio for the phone messages.

Important requirements:

Multiple lines (there will be 30 people calling this system (not at all once necessarily), and I don't want any of them to get a busy signal.

The scripts need to be able to log stuff or write to a DB or something, something which I have instant access to.

I only want to do this for one day, and of course I would like this to be as economical as possible, so installing my own hardware and a lot of phone lines is probably not going to cut it.

Does anyone know of any businesses that provide hosting for this kind of thing?

posted by aubilenon to Technology (4 answers total)

Best answer: Asterisk is an open-source PBX that runs on Linux. A vendor like Junction Networks will set up phone numbers for you and gateway the calls back to your Asterisk server over VOIP. Asterisk dialplans can handle the scripts, or a minimal dialplan can hand off to a Perl program. For this solution you'd need hardware, but only a cable-modem or DSL speed Internet connection, not a bunch of phone lines.
posted by nicwolff at 4:26 PM on July 26, 2006

Ah, and as for your actual question: you could host this application on any Linux box at any hosting vendor.
posted by nicwolff at 4:27 PM on July 26, 2006

Response by poster: Oh I already have a linux server with plenty of bandwidth. so this seems like a pretty good answer! Thanks!
posted by aubilenon at 5:09 PM on July 26, 2006

Feel free to ask me questions via the e-mail in my profile, I've built a pretty complex IVR application in an Asterisk dialplan and know some of the ins and outs. Also, the O'Reilly Asterisk book is available free on-line as a PDF.
posted by nicwolff at 7:22 PM on July 26, 2006