[asterisk-users] phone as control interface (was 99 bottles of beer)

[Steve Prior]

Steve Edwards wrote:

> Almost every room in my house has a phone -- if I could teach my kids to 
> put them back where they belong.
> 
> This could easily be extended to recognize which phone was used so it 
> could control the Myth FE in that room.
> 
> Also, it could/should be extended to control x10 devices as well...
> 
> "To control the tv in this room, press 1. To control a tv in another room, 
> press 2. To control the outside lights, press 3. To control the 
> sprinklers, press 4, ..."

A while back I was thinking along the lines of using a phone as a
home automation interface, though I was thinking of it in combination
with a voice recognitition system such as Lumenvox.  It occured to
me that when you want to turn the lights on, you don't really want to
pick up a phone, dial a special extension, and then start using menus.

What I was thinking about was what if instead of a dialtone you are
brought directly to a home automation voice menu which works in
parallel with your normal dial plan.  If you wanted to make a call,
just ignore the voice menu and dial normally.  If you wanted to
turn on the lights, just say "lights on." or somesuch.  Having a
traditional dialtone seems unnecessary when you can get more function
instead.

The trick is doing this without giving up on the use of nice existing
GUIs to manage the dialplan that we have now.  I'd like some way of
merging in the "voice dialtone" function with the existing dialplan
such that initially both are active, but as soon as either a phrase is
recognized or a button is pressed the system branches to one or the other,
but that button or phrase is passed through to the rest of the processing
and not just an extra prompt getting in the way.

Does this spark anyone's imagination or ideas to implement?

Steve