We’ve been asked to talk about using Asterisk to build scalable open-source IVRs at Pulver’s Fall VON and Digium Asterisk World. The conference is held here in Boston (our stomping grounds), and our panel is at 2pm on Tuesday, Oct 30.

I (Steve) will be on the panel along with a next gen service provider, and a very experienced Asterisk integrator. The title of the panel is Expanding to Sophisticated Services.

This is the inaugural year of the Asterisk World conference; which is the business-oriented counterpart to Astricon.

You can sign up for the full asterisk world conference, which gets you into all the keynotes and panels, or you can come to the expo only. As of today, you can still get a free expo pass if you go to the main VON site.

If you’re interested in Voiceglue, come talk to us at VON. Doug and I will be there all day Tuesday, and I’ll be back for Wednesday and part of Thursday as well.

Technorati Tags: Asterisk World, Asterisk World Panel, Open source IVR, Voiceglue, Expanding to Sophisticated Services, VON

Version 0.5 of Voiceglue is now available on the download page.

This version fixes a bug with validation of identifiers in VXML files.

If you’re getting errors like these:

      Datatype error: Type:InvalidDatatypeValueException, Message:Value 'caller' does not match regular expression facet '([a-zA-Z]|[a-zA-Z$][a-zA-Z0-9_$]*[a-zA-Z0-9_])’

      Failed to parse the URI’s content. Make sure that this document consists of valid VXML.

then you should definitely upgrade.

This version turns off Xerces XML validation, which reports valid
VXML documents (confirmed valid by XSV) as errors.

Voiceglue author Doug Campbell is planning to be at this year’s Astricon for the Thursday sessions and the first half of Friday. If you’d like to get in touch or meet with Doug, look for the tall geek muttering about VxML (just kidding, Doug generally doesn’t mutter), or drop us a line, contact details here.

Version 0.4 of Voiceglue is now available on the download page.

This version fixes a bug with cached grammars.

Thanks to those that are submitting bug reports, so they can get fixed!

Version 0.3 of Voiceglue is now available on the download page.

This version contains a one-line change to the voiceglue executable that handles newer versions of LibXML. These newer versions of LibXML give a different nodeName for text nodes than it used to. The symptom of this failing in the old version is that none of the TTS text gets heard.

Version 0.2 of Voiceglue has now been released.

It fixes a very nasty bug with cached grammars, that caused any cached grammar to terminate the script! Hard to get much done with that bug! Thanks to users on the mailing list for finding it.

Also, it removes install errors in cases where the special user accounts already exist.

The first release of Voiceglue is now available. We finished testing release 0.1 this afternoon, and it’s downloadable.

This first release supports DTMF input (no speech recognition yet), recording, and playback of TTS (via flite) and pre-recorded audio. We plan to integrate speech recognition soon using LumenVox’s engine and possibly Sphinx. Further details on features of this release are found here.

Lastly, to support the project and users, we’ve setup a mailing list.

Well, that last issue turned out to be a significant one. The base code was not properly processing SRGS grammars. We needed to fix the grammar parser to handle SRGS. We looked for an open source solution, couldn’t find one. So we had to write one from scratch. That work is now done. We simply need to do the final integration, some quick testing for obvious problems, and then package up the release. Alas, in the intervening time we had to shift resouces to a higher priority project. We are hoping to return to this last bit of effort in a couple weeks, in which case we should release by mid-May.

First release is now within days! (I’m pretty sure). We’ve been able to spend the extra time to get TTS and proper caching of both pre-recorded and TTS-generated audio working properly, shared across call threads. The last item before initial release is making sure the SRGS grammars for DTMF are getting processed correctly. As soon as that’s done, we’ll be posting the first code release.

We’ve been sidetracked with critical contract work, which is delaying us for the time being on finishing the release.