[asterisk-users] Help getting info from caller

[Steve Edwards]

On Sat, 2 Jan 2010, Landy Landy wrote:

> I was able to test the script, here is what I have:
>
> #!/usr/bin/php -q
> <?php

[snip]

> echo "SET VARIABLE BALANCE $bal #\n";
> echo "exec BackGround 'tt-monkeys' #\n";

You did not follow my previous advice ;)

You are violating the AGI protocol:

1) You did not read the AGI environment prior to executing an AGI request.

2) You are issuing requests, but not reading the responses.

If your AGI works, it is a fluke and probably will fail in the future -- 
like when your boss is demonstrating the system to a prospective client :)

You really should use an established library. As I said before, nobody 
gets it right the first time. Why re-invent an already debugged and 
documented wheel?

> echo "SET VARIABLE BALANCE $bal #\n";

What's the octothorpe for?

> echo "exec BackGround 'tt-monkeys' #\n";

The "proper" AGI command to do this is "stream file."

> Is asterisk or any other program that can work along side * able to say 
> a name or any word? For example:
>
> Lets say I have a table with name and last name I would like asterisk to 
> say "balance for john doe is 100 dollars"... Is this possible?

This is called "text to speech" or TTS.

Festival is free, Cepstral is worth the $30 or so for a license. They even 
have an Alison speech font (developed with Alison Smith) which does a 
pretty good job of matching the default Asterisk prompts.

TTS creates a wav file which you then play to the caller. (I don't think 
any of the TTS systems will output directly to an Asterisk channel.) 
Unfortunately, this does take a little time which may be noticeable to the 
caller.

If you are feeling cocky, you could write your AGI to create another 
thread to create the TTS wav file while you are streaming "The balance 
for."

Another approach would be to create the customer name TTS file and save it 
with the customer number as the file name. Then, in your AGI, you could 
check to see if the file already exists before creating a new TTS wav 
file. This way, the client may only experience a small "TTS delay" the 
first time they check their balance.

Before you get too committed to PHP, consider writing your AGIs in a 
compiled language like C. You can execute xxx AGIs written in C in the 
time it takes to load the PHP interpreter and parse your script.

-- 
Thanks in advance,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
Newline                                              Fax: +1-760-731-3000