[HN Gopher] Asterisk AI Voice Agent
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Asterisk AI Voice Agent
        
       Author : akrulino
       Score  : 182 points
       Date   : 2025-12-24 23:25 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | johnebgd wrote:
       | I welcome the spam calls from our asterisk overlords.
        
         | VladVladikoff wrote:
         | I'm honestly surprised it hasn't been more prevalent yet. I
         | still get call centre type spam calls where you can hear all
         | the background noise of the rest of the call centre.
        
           | userbinator wrote:
           | Is the background noise real, or is it also AI-generated to
           | make you think that it's a human?
        
             | tartoran wrote:
             | The background noise is a recording for sure, no AI needed,
             | just a background noise audiofile in a loop would do.
        
               | VladVladikoff wrote:
               | Why though? It adds nothing positive, it only makes me
               | sure it is a scam call.
        
               | the_af wrote:
               | I assume it's to make it seem like an actual call center
               | rather than a scam. I recently got two phone scam
               | attempts (credit card related) that sounded exactly like
               | this.
        
               | ldenoue wrote:
               | I built a voice AI stack and background noise can be
               | really helpful to a restaurant AI for example. Italian
               | background music or cafe background is part of the brand.
               | It's not meant to make the caller believe this is not a
               | bot but only to make the AI call on brand.
        
               | grim_io wrote:
               | You can call it what ever you like, but to me this is
               | deceptive.
               | 
               | Where is the difference between this and Indian support
               | staff pretending to be in your vicinity by telling you
               | about the local weather? Your version is arguably even
               | worse because it can plausibly fool people more
               | competently.
        
               | SoftTalker wrote:
               | you actually answer unknown callers?
        
               | the_af wrote:
               | Yes. Sometimes it's a legit call. Not often, though.
               | 
               | Example of legit calls: the pizza delivery guy decided to
               | call my phone instead of ringing the bell, for whatever
               | reason.
        
               | mcny wrote:
               | I worked door dash for a couple of days and there were
               | multiple people who wrote in all caps to not ring the
               | door bell. Why? I have no idea.
        
               | SoftTalker wrote:
               | Probably because it make their dogs go nuts.
        
               | Loughla wrote:
               | Yes. I own a business.
        
               | mcny wrote:
               | Also, it only takes one legitimate collect call from a
               | jail from a loved one and now I'm all in favor of reform
               | in our jail system.
               | 
               | No, it does not cost over thirty dollars to allow someone
               | accused to call their loved ones. We pay taxes. I want my
               | government to use the taxes and provide these calls for
               | free.
        
         | haroldp wrote:
         | I was more thinking I could add it to my Asterisk server to
         | honey-pot the spam callers into an infinite time waster cycle.
        
           | Daviey wrote:
           | "Hello, this is Lenny" - well known Asterisk configuration
           | from 20 years ago.
        
       | krater23 wrote:
       | Please don't. I had a talk with a shitty AI bot on a Fedex line.
       | It's absolute crap. Just give me a 'Type 1 for x, type 2 for y'.
       | Then I don't need to guess what are the possibilities.
        
         | EvanAnderson wrote:
         | Voice-controlled phone systems are hugely rage-inducing for me.
         | I am often in loud setting with background chatter. Muting my
         | audio and using a touchtone keypad is so much more accurate and
         | easy than having to find a quiet place and worrying that
         | somebody is going to say something that the voice response
         | system detects.
        
           | ssl-3 wrote:
           | I hate those, too. Especially when others are around.
           | 
           | The interface is so inconsistent between different
           | implementations that they're always terribly awkward to
           | navigate at best, and completely infuriating at worst. I
           | don't like presenting the image of an progressively-angrier
           | man who is standing around and speaking incongruous short
           | phrases that are clearly directed towards nobody at all.
           | 
           | But I've found that many of them still accept DTMF. Just mash
           | a button instead of utter a response, and a more-traditional
           | IVR tree shows up with a spoken list of enumerated options.
           | Things get a lot better after that.
           | 
           | Like pushing buttons at the gas pump to try to silence the
           | ad-roll, it's pretty low-cost to try.
        
         | 9x39 wrote:
         | One problem is once you're in deep building a phone IVR
         | workflow beyond X or Y (yes, these are intentional), callers
         | don't care about some deep and featured input menu. They just
         | mash 0 or pick a random option and demand a human finish the
         | job and transfer them - understandably.
         | 
         | When you're committed to phone intent complexity (hell), the AI
         | assisted options are sort of less bad since you don't have to
         | explain the menu to callers, they just make demands.
        
           | tartoran wrote:
           | What if the goal is to keep gaslighting you until you give up
           | your demands?
        
             | 9x39 wrote:
             | Most voice agents for large companies are a calculated game
             | to deter customers from expensive humans as we know, but
             | not always.
             | 
             | Sort of like how Jira can be a streamlined tool or a prison
             | of 50-step workflows, it's all up to the designer.
        
             | 8note wrote:
             | you bought something from the wrong company, and you arent
             | gonna get helped by phone, bot, or person
        
         | cyberax wrote:
         | Well, the future is here:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4
        
         | russdill wrote:
         | The problem here is that if it's something a voice assistant
         | can solve, I can solve it from my account. I'm calling because
         | I need to speak to an actual human.
        
           | hectormalot wrote:
           | Im in this business, and used to think the same. It turns out
           | this is a minority of callers. Some examples:
           | 
           | - a client were working does advertising in TV commercials,
           | and a few percent of their calls is people trying to cancel
           | their TV subscriptions, even though they are in healthcare -
           | in the troubleshooting flow for a client with a physical
           | product, 40% of calls are resolved after the "did you try
           | turning it off and on again" step. - a health insurance
           | client has 25% of call volume for something that is available
           | self-service (and very visible as well), yet people still
           | call. - a client in the travel space gets a lot of calls
           | about: "does my accommodation include X", and employees just
           | use their public website to answer those questions. (I.e.,
           | it's clearly available for self-service)
           | 
           | One of the things we tend to prioritize in the initial
           | conversation is to determine in which segment you fall and
           | route accordingly.
        
             | mcny wrote:
             | (reposting because something ate your newlines, I've added
             | comments in line)
             | 
             | Im in this business, and used to think the same. It turns
             | out this is a minority of callers. Some examples:
             | 
             | - a client were working does advertising in TV commercials,
             | and a few percent of their calls is people trying to cancel
             | their TV subscriptions, even though they are in healthcare
             | 
             | I guess these are probably desperate people who are trying
             | to get to someone, anyone. In my opinion, the best thing
             | people can do is get a really good credit card and do a
             | charge back for things like this.
             | 
             | - in the troubleshooting flow for a client with a physical
             | product, 40% of calls are resolved after the "did you try
             | turning it off and on again" step.
             | 
             | I bought a Chinese wifi mesh router and it literally finds
             | a time between two am and five am and reboots itself every
             | night, by default. You can turn this behavior off but it
             | was interesting that it does this by default.
             | 
             | - a health insurance client has 25% of call volume for
             | something that is available self-service (and very visible
             | as well), yet people still call.
             | 
             | In my defense, I've been on the other side of this. I try
             | to avoid calling but whenever I use self service, it feels
             | like ny settings never stick and always switch back to what
             | they want the next billing cycle. If I have to waste time
             | each month, you have to waste time each month.
             | 
             | - a client in the travel space gets a lot of calls about:
             | "does my accommodation include X", and employees just use
             | their public website to answer those questions. (I.e., it's
             | clearly available for self-service)
             | 
             | These public websites are regularly out of date. Someone
             | who is actually on site confirm that yes, they have non
             | smoking rooms or ice machines that aren't broken is
             | valuable.
             | 
             | One of the things we tend to prioritize in the initial
             | conversation is to determine in which segment you fall and
             | route accordingly.
        
               | hectormalot wrote:
               | Thx, forgot to double enter.
        
       | nextworddev wrote:
       | Can I connect this to Twilio
        
         | VladVladikoff wrote:
         | Technically yes, twilio has sip trunks.
        
         | kwindla wrote:
         | One easy way to build voice agents and connect them to Twilio
         | is the Pipecat open source framework. Pipecat supports a wide
         | variety of network transports, including the Twilio MediaStream
         | WebSocket protocol so you don't have to bounce through a SIP
         | server. Here's a getting started doc.[1]
         | 
         | (If you do need SIP, this Asterisk project looks really great.)
         | 
         | Pipecat has 90 or so integrations with all the models/services
         | people use for voice AI these days. NVIDIA, AWS, all the
         | foundation labs, all the voice AI labs, most of the video AI
         | labs, and lots of other people use/contribute to Pipecat. And
         | there's lots of interesting stuff in the ecosystem, like the
         | open source, open data, open training code Smart Turn audio
         | turn detection model [2], and the Pipecat Flows state machine
         | library [3].
         | 
         | [1] - https://docs.pipecat.ai/guides/telephony/twilio-
         | websockets [2] - https://github.com/pipecat-ai/pipecat-flows/
         | [3] - https://github.com/pipecat-ai/smart-turn
         | 
         | Disclaimer: I spend a lot of my time working on Pipecat. Also
         | writing about both voice AI in general and Pipecat in
         | particular. For example: https://voiceaiandvoiceagents.com/
        
           | nextworddev wrote:
           | This is good stuff.
           | 
           | In your opinion, how close is Pipecat + OSS to replacing
           | proprietary infra from Vapi, Retell, Sierra, etc?
        
             | kwindla wrote:
             | It depends on what you mean by replacing.
             | 
             | The integrated developer experience is much better on Vapi,
             | etc.
             | 
             | The goal of the Pipecat project is to provide state of the
             | art building blocks if you want to control every part of
             | the multimodal, realtime agent processing flow and tech
             | stack. There are thousands of companies with Pipecat voice
             | agents deployed at scale in production, including some of
             | the world's largest e-commerce, financial services, and
             | healthtech companies. The Smart Turn model benchmarks
             | better than any of the proprietary turn detection models.
             | Companies like Modal have great info about how to build
             | agents with sub-second voice-to-voice latency.[1] Most of
             | the next-generation video avatar companies are building on
             | Pipecat.[2] NVIDIA built the ACE Controller robot operating
             | system on Pipecat.[3]
             | 
             | [1] https://modal.com/blog/low-latency-voice-bot - [2]
             | https://lemonslice.com/ = [3]
             | https://github.com/NVIDIA/ace-controller/
        
               | nextworddev wrote:
               | Is there a simple, serverless version of deploying
               | Pipecat stack, without: - me having to self host on my
               | infra
               | 
               | I just want to provide: - business logic - tools -
               | configuration metadata (e.g. which voice to use)
               | 
               | I don't like Vapi due to 1) extensive GUI driven
               | experience, 2) cost
        
           | ldenoue wrote:
           | The problem with PipeCat and LiveKit (the 2 major stacks for
           | building voice ai) is the deployment at scale.
           | 
           | That's why I created a stack entirely in Cloudflare workers
           | and durable objects in JavaScript.
           | 
           | Providers like AssemblyAI and Deepgram now integrate VAD in
           | their realtime API so our voice AI only need networking (no
           | CPU anymore).
        
             | nextworddev wrote:
             | let me get this straight, you are storing convo threads /
             | context in DOs?
             | 
             | e.g. Deepgram (STT) via websocket -> DO -> LLM API -> TTS?
        
         | ldenoue wrote:
         | I developed a stack on Cloudflare workers where latency is
         | super low and it is cheap to run at scale thanks to Cloudflare
         | pricing.
         | 
         | Runs at around 50 cents per hour using AssemblyAI or Deepgram
         | as the STT, Gemini Flash as LLM and InWorld.ai as the TTS (for
         | me it's on par with ElevenLabs and super fast)
        
           | pugio wrote:
           | Do you have anything written up about how you're doing this?
           | Curious to learn more...
        
           | picardo wrote:
           | Is AssemblyAI or Deepgram compatible with OpenAI Realtime
           | API, esp. around voice activity detection and turn taking?
           | How do you implement those?
        
       | aftbit wrote:
       | This opens up new possibilities for interactive phone services.
       | Retro-futuristic for sure.
        
       | wild_egg wrote:
       | The baseline configurations all note <2s and <3s times. I haven't
       | tried any voice AI stuff yet but a 3s latency waiting on a reply
       | seems rage inducing if you're actually trying to accomplish
       | something.
       | 
       | Is that really where SOTA is right now?
        
         | wellthisisgreat wrote:
         | No, there are models with sub-second latency for sure
        
         | coderintherye wrote:
         | Microsoft Foundry's realtime voice API (which itself is
         | wrapping AI models from the major players) has response times
         | in the milliseconds.
        
         | duckkg5 wrote:
         | Absolutely not.
         | 
         | 500-1000ms is borderline acceptable.
         | 
         | Sub-300ms is closer to SOTA.
         | 
         | 2000ms or more means people will hang up.
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | play "Just a second, one moment please <sounds of
           | typing>".wave as soon as input goes quiet.
           | 
           | ChatGPT app has a audio version of the spinner icon when you
           | ask it a question and it needs a second before answering.
        
             | emil-lp wrote:
             | Alternate between that and                   play "ehh".wav
        
             | phantasmish wrote:
             | I haaaaate the fake typing noises.
        
           | matt-p wrote:
           | 160ms is essentially optimal and you can get down to about
           | 200ms AFAIK.
        
         | dnackoul wrote:
         | I've generally observed latency of 500ms to 1s with modern LLM-
         | based voice agents making real calls. That's good enough to
         | have real conversations.
         | 
         | I attended VAPI Con earlier this year, and a lot of the
         | discussion centered on how interruptions and turn detection are
         | the next frontier in making voice agents smoother
         | conversationalists. Knowing when to speak is a hard problem
         | even for humans, but when you listen to a lot of voice agent
         | calls, the friction point right now tends to be either
         | interrupting too often or waiting too long to respond.
         | 
         | The major players are clearly working on this. Deepgram
         | announced a new SOTA (Flux) for turn detection at the
         | conference. Feels like an area where we'll see even more
         | progress in the next year.
        
           | hogrug wrote:
           | I think interruptions had better be the top priority. I find
           | text LLMs rage inducing with their BS verbiage that takes
           | multiple prompts to reduce, and they still break promises
           | like one sentence by dropping punctuation. I can't imagine a
           | world where I have to listen to one of these things.
        
           | gessha wrote:
           | I wonder if it's possible to do the apple trick of hiding
           | latency using animations. The audio equivalent can be the
           | chime that Siri does after receiving a request.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | Sesame was the fastest model for a bit. Not sure what that team
         | is doing anymore, they kind of went radio silent.
         | 
         | https://app.sesame.com/
        
         | russdill wrote:
         | Been experimenting with having a local Home Assistant agent
         | include a qwen 0.5B model to provide a quick response to
         | indicate that the agent is "thinking" about the request. It
         | seems to work ok for the use case, but it feels like it'd get
         | really repetitive for a 2 way conversation. Another way to
         | handle this would be to have the small model provide the first
         | 3-5 words of a (non-commital) response and feed that in as part
         | of the prompt to the larger model.
        
         | mohsen1 wrote:
         | Just try Gemini Live on your phone. That's state of the art
        
         | bharrison wrote:
         | Perhaps you didnt read that these are "production-ready golden
         | baselines validated for enterprise deployment."
         | 
         | How does their golden nature not dissuade these concerns for
         | you?
        
         | daneel_w wrote:
         | From my personal experience building a few AI IVR demos with
         | Asterisk in early 2025, testing STT/TTS/inference products from
         | a handful of different vendors, a reliable maximum latency of
         | 2-3 seconds sounds like a definite improvement. Just a year ago
         | I saw times from 3 to 8 seconds even on short inputs rendering
         | short outputs. One half of this is of course over-committed
         | resources. But clearly the executional performance of these
         | models is improving.
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | Very randomly and personally I appear to have experimented with
         | that few months ago, based on a Japanese advent calendar
         | project[1] - the code is all over the place and only works with
         | Japanese speeches, but the gist is as follows. Also in [2].
         | 
         | The trick is to NOT wait for the LLM to finish talking, but:
         | 1 at end of user VAD, call LLM, stream response into a
         | buffer(simple enough)          2 chunk the response at [commas,
         | periods, newlines], and queue sentence-oid texts         3 pipe
         | queued sentence-oid fragments into a fast classical TTS and
         | queue audio snippets          4 play queued sentence-oid-audio-
         | snippets, maintaining correspondence of consumed audio and text
         | 5 at user VAD, stop and clear everything everywhere, undoing
         | queued unplayed voice, nuking unplayed text from chat log
         | 6 at end of user VAD, feed the amended transcripts that are
         | canonical to user's ears to step 1       7 (make sure to
         | parallelize it all)
         | 
         | This flow (hypothetically)allow such interactions as:
         | user: "what's the date today"       sys:  "[today][is
         | thursday], [decem"       user: "sorry yesterday"       sys:
         | "[...uh,][wednesday?][Usually?]"            1:
         | https://developers.cyberagent.co.jp/blog/archives/44592/
         | 2: https://gist.github.com/numpad0/18ae612675688eeccd3af5eabcfd
         | f686
        
       | looneysquash wrote:
       | That seems like bad news for Allison. Though I know she already
       | had some TTS voices available, so many not.
        
         | kamma4434 wrote:
         | She seems to be doing well
         | 
         | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wairnc-2Hyo
        
       | eugene3306 wrote:
       | I've created Asterisk Codex Skill, but turns out there is ten
       | seconds timeout for scripts
        
       | WD-42 wrote:
       | What is the application of this that makes anything better for
       | anyone? All I can think of is more spammers, scammers, horrible
       | customer support lines.
        
         | anhner wrote:
         | > What is the application of this?
         | 
         | spammers, scammers and horrible customer support lines.
        
         | asdfsfds wrote:
         | Microsoft costumer support saar
        
           | mcny wrote:
           | It is funny you mention Microsoft s customer support because
           | it is a publicly known issue at this point that I'd you are a
           | Microsoft employee or a v dash, the first level of support
           | you talk to is basically something you have to overcome to
           | get any help at all.
        
         | dmos62 wrote:
         | Good customer support lines? Is there a reason why it can't
         | provide good support. I often use chatgpt's voice function.
        
           | TZubiri wrote:
           | The expectation of customer support lines is that customers
           | want to speak to humans. It isn't just the fact that these
           | are semantics that aren't written anywhere and are open to
           | change, because by using a human-like voice agent on a
           | customer support line, you are pretending that that is a
           | human, which is a scam or fraud.
           | 
           | If you really believe that the support can be good, then use
           | a robotic text to speech, don't pretend it's a human. And
           | make it clear to users that they are talking to a human,
           | phone is a protocol that has the semantic that you speak to a
           | human. Use something else.
           | 
           | The bottom line is that you have clients that registered
           | under the belief that they could call a phone number and
           | speak to a human, businesses are performing a short-term
           | switcheroo at the expense of their clients, it's a scam.
        
             | znpy wrote:
             | > The expectation of customer support lines is that
             | customers want to speak to humans.
             | 
             | Not really. The expectation is to be able to express their
             | need in a natural language, maybe because their issue is
             | not covered by a fixed-form web form (pun not intended).
             | 
             | So yeah AI might be a good fit in that scenario.
        
               | TZubiri wrote:
               | It's a protocol and network that has backwards
               | compatibility with 19th century telegram wire networks
               | that later were voice lines for a full century.
               | 
               | If that isn't the channel to speak to a human, nothing
               | is. You can speak to a bot with an app or whatever.
               | 
               | At least make it sound robotty instead of pretending to
               | be a human.
        
           | WD-42 wrote:
           | How? Businesses will use this to justify removing what few
           | actual human support staff they have left. Nobody, and I mean
           | it, nobody calls customer support because they want to talk
           | to a computer. It's the last resort for problems that usually
           | can't be accomplished via the already existing technical
           | flows available via computer.
        
             | b112 wrote:
             | Beyond true.
             | 
             | I wonder what Amazon's goals are, as an example. Currently,
             | at least on the .ca website, there is no way to even get to
             | chat to fix problems. All their spider text of help
             | options, now always lead back to the return page.
             | 
             | So it's call them (which you can only find the number via
             | Google.)
             | 
             | I suspect they're so disfunctional, that they don't
             | understand why the massive uptick in calls, so then they
             | slap AI in via phone too.
             | 
             | And so now that's slow and AI drivel. I guess soon I'll
             | just have to do chargebacks!? Eg, if a package is missing
             | or whatever.
        
               | Antoniocl wrote:
               | Interesting, I regularly use chat-based support on
               | amazon.ca to speak with (what I presume is) a real human
               | after none of the control flow paths adequately resolve
               | my issue. I've always found the support quick to reply
               | and very helpful.
               | 
               | Granted, it's been 1-2 weeks since I had an issue, so it
               | may have changed since then, or it could be only released
               | to a subset of users.
        
             | dmos62 wrote:
             | That's not true. I recently called to make an appointment.
             | I don't care if it's an AI. I would actually prefer it,
             | because I wouldn't feel bad about taking a long time to
             | pick the best time. Don't you think you're being a bit
             | dogmatic about this?
        
               | f33d5173 wrote:
               | I have to feel that an online booking system is
               | substantially lower tech than an ai voice assitant
               | chatbot, and makes it even easier to ruminate as you pick
               | the time that works for you.
        
               | dmos62 wrote:
               | In my case, the business did have human support
               | assistants, but didn't do reservations via the phone. I
               | had to switch to the web app for that, which was annoying
               | (I was driving?). I guess doing user identification over
               | the phone and scheduling the appointment are time-
               | consuming for the human assistant, while these are some
               | of the few things an app can do well. I presume the logic
               | is to preserve human assistants for actually complicated
               | or dynamic assistance, for the sake of cost-efficiency. A
               | voice llm can bring down the cost of these basic-but-
               | time-consuming interactions.
        
         | Kim_Bruning wrote:
         | This might be good for Back-office hands-free tool access, for
         | employees who are on the road. (they shouldn't be looking at
         | the screen, and they might be limited to voice calling due to
         | coverage issues besides). Aka: really weird terminal.
        
         | bronco21016 wrote:
         | My local dealership adopted one of these for their service
         | department. Prior to the AI assistant, you would call and
         | immediately be placed on hold because the same people serving
         | customers at the desk were answering the phone. The AI picks up
         | right away and can schedule an oil change. It's fantastic and
         | I'd love to see more of this. Of course it also has the ability
         | to escalate to a human for the things it doesn't have
         | capabilities for.
         | 
         | For narrow use cases like this I personally don't mind these
         | tools.
        
           | WD-42 wrote:
           | If they have the ability to hook an llm up to a system that
           | can schedule an oil change why can't they provide a form on
           | their website to do the same thing and save everyone the
           | hassle?
        
             | quaheezle wrote:
             | They do offer the ability to schedule an oil change via the
             | website and yet some people still prefer to call. User
             | preference and multi-channel servicing options are nice to
             | support
        
               | WD-42 wrote:
               | They do? How do you know?
        
               | Antoniocl wrote:
               | Unsure about whether the specific dealership in question
               | supports online booking, but there existing consumers
               | whose preference is for a phone call over a web-based
               | experience is definitely the case, at least in the US.
               | 
               | For example, even with the (digital-only) SAAS company I
               | work at, we have a non-trivial amount of customers who
               | with strong preferences to talk on the phone, ex to
               | provide their credit card number, rather than enter it in
               | the product. This is likely more pronounced if your
               | product serves less tech-savvy niches.
               | 
               | That said, a strong preference for human call > website
               | use doesn't necessarily imply even a weak preference for
               | AI call > website use (likely customer-dependent, but I'd
               | be surprised if the number with that preference was
               | exactly 0)
        
               | keeganpoppen wrote:
               | how about the plainly obvious fact that every call tree
               | system first spends 1-8 minutes going through all the
               | things that you can actually do on the website instead of
               | calling: do you really think they would bother with that
               | if people aren't calling about stuff that is easily done
               | on the website? sure, we all agree that it is partly
               | designed to get people to hang up in disgust and give up,
               | but that is an obviously insufficient explanation
               | compared to the simpler and more comprehensive
               | explanation that people simply do, as a matter of fact,
               | prefer to use the phone despite it being clearly less
               | useful for easily-computer-able tasks.
        
               | tguvot wrote:
               | >sure, we all agree that it is partly designed to get
               | people to hang up in disgust and give up
               | 
               | actually, as someone who works in this area - no, it's
               | not. it designed to help people to do things and metrics
               | of success are closely monitored
        
               | HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
               | It is often both.
        
               | HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
               | Have you never worked in customer service?
        
             | mh- wrote:
             | Not everyone wants to use a form on their website?
             | 
             | You and I certainly do, but a ton of people prefer calling
             | on the phone.
        
               | brunoarueira wrote:
               | In Brazil, multiple companies are offering a call and
               | WhatsApp, both through automated messages with menus and
               | in the end escalate to humans.
        
             | PoachedEggs wrote:
             | Both can be true. They might have those web forms, while
             | also having enough customers that prefer phone calls to
             | justify it.
        
             | Rebelgecko wrote:
             | Just ask your LLM to call the dealership. The only downside
             | is spoken word is a bit slow for computers. Maybe we can
             | even work out a protocol where the LLM voices talk faster
             | and faster until they can't hear tokens clearly
        
               | WD-42 wrote:
               | At that point we'll have to convert the voices into a
               | form more amenable to machine to machine communication.
               | Perhaps a system based on high and low signals.
               | 
               | Seriously what is the point of all this.
        
               | ffsm8 wrote:
               | Pretty sure rebelgecko was using [Sarcasm] in order to
               | increase his [Satire] enjoyment
        
             | bronco21016 wrote:
             | They do, via the manufacturer's app. It works fine as well.
             | 
             | Situational context matters though, sometimes you get in
             | the vehicle and get the alert. Just say "Hey Siri, call
             | dealership" and away you go hands free. No messing with
             | apps.
        
       | kamma4434 wrote:
       | Nice to see Asterisk on the home page of HN. It's been a while...
       | 
       | Even if the focus is now on hosted telephony, my experience is
       | that everywhere you can hear the default nusic-on-hold
        
         | louky wrote:
         | I don't mind music-on-hold as much except when they break with
         | a human voice at intervals saying inane things such as "your
         | call is important to us. Thank you for holding" Which makes me
         | think the call has been answered. If there's not actual call
         | queue information, just play music so I can ignore it and
         | continue working without that NOP interrupt.
        
           | ale42 wrote:
           | I guess the comment was just about how much Asterisk
           | deployments are out there because you can often hear its
           | default music-on-hold? But maybe I'm wrong.
        
       | RockRobotRock wrote:
       | Long shot, if anyone here is an Asterisk wizard. I would like to
       | correlate CDRs to voicemail recording locations. I am building an
       | integrated dashboard for call recordings, and want voicemails to
       | be included, but that's been surprisingly difficult.
        
         | parrotplatform wrote:
         | So, there is no straight forward way that I can think of. But,
         | what I would do is set a channel variable and log it somewhere:
         | 
         | exten => s,n,Set(VM_UNIQUEID=${UNIQUEID}) exten =>
         | s,n,VoiceMail(${EXTEN}@default)
         | 
         | If you are using AGI or ARI, you can log it somewhere useful so
         | you can correlate later.
         | 
         | If you are using a more vanilla configuration I'd say use the
         | voicemail metadata .txt file that will be in the same folder as
         | the recording to get info to find the CDR. It has things like
         | callerid, origmailbox, origdate (or maybe it's origtime), and
         | duration. origmailbox should match the CDR destination and the
         | orig time should also match. Haven't done this specifically.
         | But, I'm hoping I'm pointing you in the right direction.
         | 
         | I work with Freeswitch almost exclusively these days. But, my
         | first experience with VoIP was Asterisk and a huge Perl AGI
         | file keeping everyone talking to each other. Those were good
         | time!
        
       | Tikrong wrote:
       | Looked at a repo and it seems this project was heavily AI
       | generated. Would be interesting to hear from the author of the
       | project how it was built.
        
         | ghurtado wrote:
         | > Looked at a repo and it seems this project was heavily AI
         | generated
         | 
         | That's the first thing that I noticed too.
         | 
         | It's gotten to the point that my body subconsciously rejects
         | bullet lists and headings that start with emojis.
        
           | Tikrong wrote:
           | Yep, and the number of commits is insane. In early commits
           | there are cursor rules and reports about task complexity made
           | by AI. So it's really interesting, how was the project
           | created.
        
           | scsh wrote:
           | Independent of any feelings about the use of AI, I find that
           | specific style of formatting to be extremely visually
           | distracting and tend to click away because of that. Emoji,
           | imo, are very information dense per character so it makes the
           | rest of the info hard to parse.
        
             | Tikrong wrote:
             | When I see this style first thing that comes to mind is
             | that the whole text was generated and maybe not even read
             | by the author. And I am not yet confident to trust AI in
             | writing the docs without supervision. So I have troubles in
             | trusting the whole thing I see because of that.
        
               | scsh wrote:
               | That's also a totally fair take!
        
           | fennecbutt wrote:
           | Yes, developers on my teams have started submitting PRs
           | exactly like this and the content of the PR is similar. Still
           | need to figure out how to put a stop to it.
        
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