[Voiceglue] Request input on project roadmap

[Stephen Smith]

Hi all, and thank you all for using Voiceglue, contributing on the wiki, and
helping out on the mailing list.      This is a brief note to get a
discussion going about the project roadmap.


We've just finished a substantial set of work on the 0.9, 0.10, and 0.11
releases.   0.9 comprised support (and regression testing) on a broad set of
platforms, and Voiceglue now runs on 32 and 64-bit Ubuntu and Fedora, both
32 and 64 bit, and Asterisk 1.2, 1.4 and 1.6.     0.10 brought a rewrite of
all sound file management, including new media types and accurate caching
based upon a variety of http header and cookie techniques.  And 0.11 fixes a
few critical bugs that manifested themselves primarily on large scale
implementations.


Other than some minor issues, Voiceglue is reasonably complete and is
getting stable and more mature.    However, we routinely get requests for a
few large items:


1. Support for ASR (we've been saving the 1.0 designation for when we
finally have ASR)

2. Support for some sort of call analysis and beep detection on outbound
calls, so that scripts could catch an event indicating that an answering
machine beep was heard

3. Support for Freeswitch as an Asterisk alternative for highly scalable
applications


Ampersand has investigated these three items, and has a sense of how much
work they would take.    Unfortunately it's more than we can commit to
tackling on a full-time basis right now (we estimate about three man
months).   We've just come off a period of high investment in Voiceglue,
funding over 500 hours so far this year on the three releases mentioned
above, in addition to countless hours that Doug donates in his spare time.
 Right now we're flat out on paid consulting work so we're only able to work
on Voiceglue in our spare time.


Two of our users have independently contacted us and offered some partial
funding if we could prioritize the work for ASR and call analysis / beep
recognition.  We're appreciative of such offers, and if we had enough
funding we would be willing to focus Doug's core effort on these task.
 The amounts offered so far are helpful, but they don't get us far enough to
allow us to pull him off of our consulting activities.    So, this email as
well as an update is also a bit of a query to the user community especially
some of the corporate users to see if anyone else needs these capabilities
and would be willing to join in funding them.   If interested, please get in
touch with me (Steve Smith,s.smith at ampersand.com) and I can discuss the
particulars and the type of funding we'd be looking for.


Other than that, this is the opportunity to influence the next directions of
the project, and I'd invite users to send notes to the mailing list if you
have ideas for what we might want to include in the project roadmap.  Let us
know what you would like to see in future Voiceglue releases!


Doug and Steve
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