101 Things You Can Do With Asterisk (and more)!
Asterisk is More Than Just a Phone System
Over the last nine years Asterisk has emerged as world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit, however most people simply know it as an open source phone system. Over the last five years that we have been involved in the Asterisk community, we have heard of dozens of different things that people are using Asterisk for or have done with Asterisk.
Personally, I can think of about 25 things (don’t worry I am not competing) that I have heard people do with Asterisk and as the visibility and viability of open source communications continues to grow, more and more applications and uses are coming out each and every day. In a effort to have a little fun and to catalog the many uses and applications of Asterisk, VoIP Supply has partnered with Digium, the creators of Asterisk, to run a contest here on the VoIP Insider to find 101 things you can do with Asterisk.
101 Things You Can Do With Asterisk Rules and Details
The premise is simple.
After reading the rest of this post, simply place a comment below that details a unique use or application of Asterisk that you have had a hand in using/deploying or one that you know of (duplicate instances will be deleted).
When we hit 101 things that you can do with Asterisk, we will pick one winner at random for a $1,500.00 VoIP Supply shopping spree (store credit) sponsored by Digium and VoIP Supply.
So what are you waiting for?
Let’s hear what you or someone else has done with Asterisk!
Update: Due to an overwhelming response, we are extending the contest until Friday of this week. Let’s see how many unique uses for Asterisk we can document!
Update: the contest is now closed. Our winner was Ashley Kitto. For more information visit our follow-up post.
279 Comments
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(1) Not only get vmail, but receive an SMS when you miss a call and no message is left.
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(2) SMS asterisk to call me back on cell or at pay phone with a line to call long distance.
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(3) Determine from your calendar how much you might want to speak to a particular caller (something like you do on GMail with email message filters)
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Send an IM that prompts Asterisk to make calls out to link two different callers together.
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(1) Ring your home phone(s) with a special ring pattern when your doorbell is pressed.
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(2) Provide an IVR that give you access to your home automation to turn on/off lights, open the driveway gate, garage door, etc.
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Integrating Asterisk with Nagios to automatically generate alerts for service outages.
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(3) monitor/record your kids phone calls
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Auto Dialing such as Reverse911/Community Notifications, Telemarketing, Political Polling, Automated Collections & Appointment Reminders
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Integrate with TV graphics systems to provide a live count of open phone lines for a religious broadcaster during a fund raising drive
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Implement large Multi-site Call Centers with screen pops integrating with custom order entry tools.
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Create an Asterisk Cluster with Dundi , DNS SRV and Realtime to be able to have a mega Asterisk with n potential asterisk in cluster. It really works as expected
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Automatically screen telemarketers using the http://www.whocalled.us web api with AGI
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Build easily configured portable, emergency comm systems able to integrated wired & wireless channels of many sorts into portable disaster recovery racks. Think FEMA, post-hurricane or tornado.
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Create an “In-Stock” notification which calls you when a particular product becomes in stock on certain web merchants. (*Think of Tickle-Me Elmo, Wii, or whatever other *hot* item you want)
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Integrate with SMS content platform so when an SMS is sent with a special keyword, a call-back from Asterisk is initiated to the sender of the SMS and the content associated with the keyword is played back for them.
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Integrate with billing system in order to re-sell toll-free services to third parties.
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Using Asterisk you can create a virtual hunt group for your city or club. We built ServiceGuy initially for pool guys. The pool guy enters his phone number in our system, a consumer calls our citywide pool guy number and all pool guys in the system are called at the same time. Consumers get to talk to someone immediately, pool guys get incremental business. Win-Win. http://www.serviceguy.org
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Implement on hold games to amuse customers forced to wait in que. IVR trivia for example. Vary their que position based upon their answers.
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Develop and host a virtual telephone contest. Nationwide contest, run multiple weeks and multiple times per day set to the atomic clock. Specific caller wins I.E. the 101st caller - YOU win!, call record the happy winner, and patch the winner to the local radio station in one of the 50 states the call came into. Also, record the runner-up and 3rd place winner for each contest. All while you watch and see the calls online. Fun and Cool Stuff.
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Provide private number service - where calls to a special number are re-routed to personal phone number of the service user. Hence not necessitating the service user to disclose their personal phone number.
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Implement tiered help desk for technical support, allowing customers with a PIN to direct dial more advanced support staff.
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Use IP DIDs to provide your customers local number access to your support team. In my case it got around the fact that ABC/ Disney does not allow overseas calling for anyone below dept heads.
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Allow web site members to have a voice recording on their profile page by just calling a phone number, entering in their profile number and recording it.
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Spoof the outbound caller ID when calling your girlfriend or wife. “Honey… I’m still at the office.”
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Make a phone call
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Integrate Asterisk, Hylafax and Redfone’s TDMoE to replace our 3rd party fax provider, saving us over $3000/month in fax charges. We even wrote a webservice in front of Hylafax that emulates our previous fax provider so we didn’t need to change our application code.
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Provide a wake up call service to your phone when you receive your wakeup call have it quote stock prices, weather, flight information or a pre-recorded message
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Have it call your children to Text to Speak a bedtime story.
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Used soft phones for a certain group deployed in Iraq to be able to call family at home cost effectively.
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I like the transfer of my incomming phone calls to my cell phone. It passes the caller ID as well. This makes it much easier to run my business
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Interface Asterisk with my HomeSeer home automation system to originate calls to me for various alarm or trouble conditions. I use the same interface to announce incoming caller-ID over the home paging system.
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Integrate asterisk with building security allowing visitors to be buzzed in by pressing a key on the phone.
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Get voice reminders for items on your todo list.
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Use Asterisk and the Custom-Contexts modules in FreePBX to support a vacation home and provide the full richness of Asterisk features 150 miles from the server. I’m able to provide local E911 via the custom-contexts module.
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Have queues setup so you can dial in and listen to different types of music from anywhere in the world.
This includes live internet streams, mp3 playlists and TV stations
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Integrate Asterisk with GSM gateway at my remote home in India
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Integrated a Metaswitch Class 5 phone switch for voicemail and Music on hold features that would have cost a fortune if a retail package was purchased.
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Provide softphone and PC camera to remote customer technical contact. Long distance and international customers can now call a four digit extension to speak with and see a helpdesk technician. The camera can also be used to help our technician better understand an equipment problem
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Create an emergency notification system for the campus classrooms using Asterisk and Snom phones. Scripts call all of the registered phones and play an emergency announcement through the speakerphone like a page. Features include auto-recall if the announcement isn’t acknowledged or there was a failed call, and notification of such failures to campus police. System is also used to provide 911 service.
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One of the neatest things I’ve been doing which always makes a good impression is to
recognize the inbound Caller-ID and give a custom treatment to the call.For example, when John is calling from either his cell, office, or home phone, he’s greeted with an announcement “good john!”, and directly transferred to the person he always want to talk to. When Bill the CEO is calling, then all manager phones are ringing so that he gets an immediate answer. But when anyone else is calling, they go through the regular voice prompts.
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Road Warrior + Softphone (IAX2 based of course to transverse some troublesome NAT/routing issues) + Asterisk = always connected and available staff
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Asterisk has allowed us to setup a fully featured Phone Banking system in multiple languages for our clients
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Use Asterisk as the basis for a dial-in conference bridge service
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Integrate asterisk with amateur radio repeaters to create a coast-to-coast repeater system over an IP network
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Inform an analyst that a computer model had finished running with a phone call - instead of needing the analyst to remain in front of the computer.
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Use Asterisk to build feature rich IVR trees, including Voice Recognition, and 411 services. Similar to 800-GOOG411.
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integrate it with a php front end so that the person on call this week sets their status as “oncall”, thus forwarding all after hours call to the person who is “oncall”, rather than the person having to carry a on call pager or the company having to maintain one.
You can also setup the system to call another tech if the first person doesnt answer.
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Integrate phone support with our internal ticket system. When a client calls support, they input their client number and a secret pin number. From there, we list their current products, and they choose which one they’re having an issue with. Then we automatically add a support ticket for that client/product, and add them to our queue; when the support person gets their call, they can see what website it’s for on their caller id.
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Implement a receptionist in/out functionality so that when receptionist is in - general calls go to her, but when she isn’t general calls go to everybody. Allowing quick response to all calls, but minimizing disruption to everybody when receptionist is in.
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* Record those staff conference calls and automagicly post them to the wiki.
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Assign a ring group to every one who needs to stay in contact but is on the go instead of an extension. Then put their desk phone, soft phone and using the # parameter their cell number in the ring group. Then when someone enters their ring group number ( which would be the published extension number on their business card ). The caller would be put through.
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Use one Asterisk to manage multiple businesses in one physical location. Users can be completely segregated. Use DIDs to manage routing of calls and even notify receptionist which business is being called.
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Run a telephone survey IVR system
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send voicemail to multiple e-mail boxes
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Using Asterisk you can very cheaply and easily run a sports-picking hotline.
If you are good a picking the winning team before a sports game, you can sell your picks to subscribers over the hotline. Your prepaid members will have a pin number that they enter and will then be able to hear picks from their selected categories.
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bridge church audio system service to freeconferencecall.com and record it so the people that missed the service can call and listen later - agi interface to put the last 10 conference call recording in a menu so the listener can choose which service to listen to.
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Open your security gate / door automatically through transmitted DTMF after somebody enters in a passcode. Save yourself the time of having to answer the phone every time.
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schedule a ‘bail-out’ call to tactfully disengage from an uncomfortable social interaction or drawn-out business meeting.
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You can play Zork by phone using Asterisk:
http://uc.org/read/ZoIP -
Created a fanless solid state home PBX system that integrates to the office PBX. distinctive ringing if it is a office call. also forwards calls to cell phone and displays modified caller id depending what prompt is selected
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Deploy an call back schedule system to advise over any even on google calendar
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Use an Astribank connected to your Asterisk with some dialplan programming to receive notification when a doorbell is pressed and then the contact closure of the Astribank to operate the electric unlock mechanism.
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We have a system monitoring package running in our server room that monitors the status of our servers, the software running on those servers and the logging messages from our servers and networking hardware. It is set to call astersisk which in turn runs an agi script to parse a system status website. Then depending on the severity of the situtation asterisk will either execute a script specific to fixing the problem or call our system administrator and informing them that there is a problem, what the problem is, and what location it is at.
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Gas powered generator running a small form factor PC running Asterisk using satellite to make emergency calls during disaster situations. Good for when cell phone towers are down or overloaded and backup power is down and even backup-backup power is down.
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Register a remote SIP phone, or connect two asterisk servers over a VPN connection to have reasonably secure communication with a remote office anywhere without long distance charges.
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We have installed asterisk at our hospital and have developed a disaster drill-down calling list. If a disaster happens a user simply dials the extension of the drill-down and all the important people are called and left a pre-recorded message to report to work asap.
(We used to have to manually call all those people) -
Used asterisk to bridge using H323 signalling between an Avaya Definity PBX in a call center and a Spectel/Avaya conference bridge in a colo to provide VOIP voicepaths (Not on revenue ports) for operators in a call center for a conferencing provider.
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Have a virtual extension overseas to:
Talk free with your sister living there,
Let your sister dial any number with your local trunk in the US -
Asterisk, Bash and Cron as a Supervisory System: Use Asterisk with cron and a simple bash script to monitor an ISP 802.11Link and phone the technical support in case a failure occurs or in case predefined parametres are not met.
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I created a script that allows people to “log their phones in.” When their extension is dialed, it automatically calls the phone where that user is logged in.
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Track usage with CDR. Can be used to determine if more phone lines are needed, for client billing, or (policy allowing) inappropriate use.
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Created a “digital replay” system to have an end user call in with an access code and pin to hear an archived conference call recording. Alternatively gathering voice prompts from the end user for later processing. (Please say your name/company name, etc..)
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Provide a secret DISA number that can be used for things like caller id readback, caller id setting, checking voicemail, calling voip systems like FWD from normal telephone.
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Redirect incoming calls with a specific known, or any unknown/restricted caller ID information trying to reach a specific extension. (stalker/harassment problems)
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Implement an extension that reads weather from NOAA’s national weather service.
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Automatically play SIT tones (with Zapateller) to disconnect telemarketers with no caller id.
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Floating receptionist: Different people act as receptionist at different times, and they simply log in and log out as they are available. This keeps from having all phones rign and disturb everyone, yet the calls are handled well
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I created a script to filter incoming calls by area code so only areas in which we do business can use our 800 number.
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A large financial institution came to us with a problem. How can we get our customers to their loan counselors the most efficiently? A Cisco distributer quoted them $500,000 for 25 phones and an IVR system. With Asterisk we were able to to price at just over $20,000 with programming. The programming allowed us to do all the standard database query IVR events to determine which loan went to which customer. However it also allowed us to build custom reports with the MySQL integration to show the time spent with each customer. Furthermore we have all the phones callerids set using a LDAP query to the originators Active Directory user database.
If that is not enough, unlike other telephone systems we can monitor the status of the extensions, PRI, system load, etc by using Nagios to alert us to any problems. No other PBX comes close to this functionality for the price.
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I replaced a Comdial system with Asterisk at a $9M company experiencing 200% annual growth. It saved our call center $250K the first year in long distance bills and costly upgrades to the legacy system. In one month, we took 16,000 calls and talked 777 hours. Asterisk allowed us to easily scale at ridiculous rates, while providing great metrics- so we could plan for staffing and adding network capacity.
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You can pass music instead of ringing, while audio is only being passed one way, before the channel is answered.
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Modifed dictate app to allow multiple doctors to dial-in, authenticate off a mysql database, and record their dictations.
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A patient notification system whereas a doctor would dial into the system and record a message for a patient which will then call out to the patient at specified intervals until the message is heard/acknowledged. They are prompted for their pin code prior to playing the message due to privacy issues. The patient is provided a card with the dial in instructions/pin codes to access their information.
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Could use asterisk to do a telephone-based (out of band) version of port knocking to open a port on your firewall.
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Created a speech recognition interface to a home automation system (yeah the home automation folks are here en-masse), but I can tell my Asterisk to make me coffee in the morning, and it asks me what time I’d like it ready.
I also used a conference bridge as a baby monitor, accessible from any IAX device worldwide, so I was able to hear my infant son fuss when I was out-of-country, and page my wife in the next room. -
You can use a web browser to manage conference calls.
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I have a system using cron + pre-recorded messages + an auto-answer Ethernet phone to automatically announce on school mornings 5 and 2 minute warnings in the kitchen before the school bus comes.
We’ve been using this for almost 2 years.
The future version of this will automatically check the snow day status and cancel the announcements on days when school has been cancelled.
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Setup several little features to make our phones much more useful and cost effective. Including a call-in and back out system to avoid high cost international calls from our cell phones and making an 800 number forward to our house / work / cell so that we can be reached wherever we are in case of emergency.
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I created a simple but effective “reminder” application. You dial the reminder line, follow the prompts to indicate how frequently you want to be reminded (once, every x mns, daily, weekly, yearly, etc…) and you then record a 30s max message to indicate what you need to remember.
Asterisk will then call you as frequently as you requested to remind you of your task; and offer a “snooze” option to stop reminders for a certain period of time, and a
“stop” option to disable the reminder (just this reminder or all of them). -
You can have one number call all your phones, VoIP or not.
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click-to-call from your contacts application on your computer.
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Snow day announcement. Via web page, enter user authentication, pick schools affected, and pre-recorded message to play. Asterisk will call, play recording to quickly inform students/families, that either school is closed or schol is open but buses are not running. ( I know is a Canadian thing )
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You can use asterisk to follow all call to your cell phone when on the road.
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Made an endless telemarketing IVR to send telemarketers to.
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Give your teenager her own extension so you don’t get bothered 30 times a day by their friends
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Use existing analog phone(s) on an IP voice network, allowing some of the benefits of an IP voice system at less cost.
An ATA or extra FXS port on a card with an existing cordless phone can be much cheaper than a WIFI SIP phone.
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I did this when I was starting out with asterisk. Get a POTS number, and have it call your extension, but leave a two second window for you to hit the # key. Then ask for a passcode and throw you into DISA.
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Use the advice at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Telemarketer+Torture to intergrate a IVR menu to transfer tele-markters too.
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We use Asterisk for our PSTN gateways - PRI’s come in and SIP comes out. The work great, and allow us to route calling easily around our network. Plus we have built-in redundancy using multiple gateways.
My second favorite function is the vmNAG - we POP the headers from folks VMails (separate vm server) and if the vm has not been listened to for a certain amount of time (say 4 minutes in the case of an emergency vmbox) then we auto-dial out to a series of numbers until one connects. The person who connects presses “1″ and they hear the vm that has waited (and not been responded to by the person on call…)
peace.
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Screen out pesky late night phone calls based on a schedule of your choosing.
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Setup up a inbound rule that so that when the ex-wife calls she is automatically forwarded to dial-a-prayer!
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Broadcast dialer capable of doing answering machine detection to detect human. The dialer is capable to transfer the potential client to a live agent if the potential customer press a key. The agent can be an external phone number or a SIP agent.
The setup was tested on up to 8 PRI and with up to 300 SIP trunks dialing simultaneously.
The same architecture is also used for rela estate market surveys.
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Use it to lower roaming costs!! If you forward your cell phone in your country to a local line, use asterisk to forward it to your overseas mobile, with minimal roaming costs…
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Link Asterisk and an an Instant Messaging platform to allow inbound calls to be routed via IVR first, then to only ring phones of users in a department that are broadcasting a particular presence; i.e. “Available”.