DIgium Asterisk World turned out to be a good conference. Attendance was higher than I had anticpated, perhaps 150 people at the keynote and more than that aggregated amongst the different tracks and on the floor. Lot’s of interested parties, including enterprise buyers, vars, and a good showing by the business-oriented parts of the community, which was the goal of the event.

Our panel was well attended, and we had a good discussion about what “sophisticated services” mean from both a carrier and an application perspective. Moderator Bryan Johns did a good job and made some thoughtful comments. Co-panelist Chris Gatch talked about the benefits of using a next gen carrier and how asterisk as a pbx can take full advantage of such services.

Our slides are attached here, short and sweet. We overviewed different areas of sophisticated services possible on asterisk, such as conferencing, outbound campaigns, ACD/CTI, etc., then we focused on IVR and gave a short 4-slide overview of VXML, openVXI, and Voiceglue (including the voiceglue architecture diagram below — you can click thru to flickr for a bigger version). Several people asked some insightful questions, and in the post-panel discussions we had some requests for future project directions such as call control.

On last item of note is that we had a good talk with Craig Campbell of Cepstral, who donated a SDK so that we can integrate his TTS into Asterisk — which we plan to do as soon as we finish with our ASR integration. We do have a bit a of a roadmap that we’ve been putting together, and we’ll get a post out on that in the near future.

Technorati Tags: Asterisk World, Expanding to Sophisticated Services, VON2007, Voiceglue