[Asterisk-Users] Predictive Dialers

[mattf]

Golly, are you thinking about building a predictive dialer with Asterisk? 

Detecting voicemail and answering machines over 50% of the time is pretty
darn tough, and the way that several commercial churn-dialing systems do it
is to detect silence or other typical audio patterns (like clicks or quite
static) by analyzeing tiny samples(recordings) of the first couple seconds
of the phone call(this is one of the reasons we usually hear a
couple-second-long quiet pause before a telemarketer comes on the line).
This kind of signal processing is very processor intensive for a predictive
dialer system and usually occurs through a dedicated DSP on the board(like
on a Dialog board) like the kind that us Asterisk users don't have to work
with. This makes TRUE predictive dialing on a large scale(more than 6 agents
per server) very difficult on an Asterisk system(many say GOOD to this). 

There are a couple dialer projects going on right now with Asterisk that
have released code:
- Shady-dial (http://shadydial.sourceforge.net/)
	Lead by some nice Europeans, they have a beta of it up and running
supposedly handling up to 10 agents per server, although I'm not sure of
exactly what level of 'Predictive' the dialer is(whether it detects
voicemail/answering machines and such). This dialer alters the code of
Asterisk and is dependant upon PostgreSQL as a database backend. There is
some documentation on installation and usage and it is released mostly under
the GPL. This dialer does not restrict what kind of phones you can use with
it(I'd love to hear more from them or people using this system on the
specifics of their project)

- VICIDIAL (http://astguiclient.sf.net/)
	Lead by my company, we are currently developing our 6th production
release of a one-call-at-a-time dialer(this is NOT predictive). We have
placed over one million calls through this system in the last 12 months
mostly to the UK and Australia. It has complete installation instructions,
full web-based administration as well as a cross-platform GUI client. It is
mostly written in perl, runs on top of an unaltered Asterisk codebase, is
dependant on a MySQL as it's backend database and is released under the GPL.
If you use this you are limited to SIP clients and Zaptel channels. There
are currently 6 companies that are using this system in production
envoronments that I know about.(I'd love to hear from other companies using
this system too.)

MATT---






-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Jones [mailto:bjlist at websonix.ca]
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2004 2:29 PM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Predictive Dialers


Hi,

I was just wondering if anyone knows how predictive dialers detect 
voicemail and answering machines, and if they could explain to me how 
that works.

Thanks!

Brian.

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