[Asterisk-Users] Predictive Dialers

[Brian Jones]

On 9-Jul-04, at 3:29 PM, mattf wrote:

> 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).

Thanks for the info Matt.  This was exactly what I wanted. :)

I am looking at the possibility of developing some type of predictive 
dialing system, or customize a pre-existing solution.

I might try doing some experiments designing an audio processor to 
detect silence at the beginning of a call.  We'll see what I can come 
up with.

Brian.


>
> 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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