[Asterisk-Users] Announcements via IAX phones

[Steve Murphy]

Hello--

What I'd like to do:
Use IAX softphones running on computers, in Auto-answer mode, with sound
going to speakers, as a sort of public announcement system.

What isn't working:
Well, my first experiment was to set up the MeetMe system described on
the Wiki...
This works fine for voice announcements. You pick up a phone, dial the
right extension, and an agi is fired up to put files in the call spool
to call the autoanswer extensions, simultaneously as it were, and all
are entered into the same conference. The caller is the admin. You 
speak, they hear. It works fine. I changed the "kicked" gsm to a beep,
as the conference is terminated by kicking everyone off, and it
is kinda comical to end an announcement with "You are kicked from the 
conference" message at the end...

But, I need to play automated announcements. So, I whipped together
an agi to generate the sounds in the right sequence. But, how do I 
link it to a conference? Since they are not ZAP channels, the softphones
don't seem to be able to handle the background agi option (the Meetme
'b' option), which would have been a potential way to play the sounds to
the conference.

I tried a Meetme call inside the agi. It kinda hangs-- You can be in a
conf, but you can't play sounds to it until it ends... that won't work!

Thought about firing an AGI to call each softphone and dump the
sequenced list of sounds, but it would take a while to run serially thru
the list of phones to announce. This is unacceptable. It's all at once,
or it's useless.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm running short on them at the moment.

Seems asterisk is powerful enough to do anything... but this?

murf


-- 
Steve Murphy <murf at e-tools.com>
Electronic Tools Company