Page 353 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

used for, this is understandable. Nevertheless, to the telecom industry, the term IVR
represents far more than an AA. An AA generally does little more than present a way
for callers to be transferred to extensions, and it is built into most proprietary voicemail
systems—but IVR can be so much more.

IVR systems are generally very expensive not only to purchase, but also to configure.
A custom IVR system will usually require connectivity to an external database or ap-
plication. Asterisk is arguably the perfect IVR, as it embraces the concepts of connec-
tivity to databases and applications at its deepest level.
Here are a few examples of relatively simple IVRs that an Asterisk system could be used
to create:
Weather reporting
Using the Internet, you can obtain text-based weather reports from around the
world in a myriad of ways. Capturing these reports and running them through a
purpose-built parser (Perl would probably eat this up) would allow the information
to be available to the dialplan. Asterisk’s sound library already contains all of the
required prompts, so it would not be an onerous task to produce an interactive
menu to play current forecasts for anywhere in the world.
Math programs
Ed Guy (the architect of Pulver’s FWD network) did a presentation at AstriCon
2004 in which he talked about a little math program he’d cooked up for his daugh-
ter to use. The program took him no more than an hour to write. What it did was
present her with a number of math questions, the answers to which she keyed into
the telephone. When all the questions were tabulated, the system presented her
with her score. This extremely simple Asterisk application would cost tens of
thousands of dollars to implement on any closed PBX platform, assuming it could
be done at all. See Chapter 9 for further details. As is so often the case, things that
are simple for Asterisk would be either impossible or massively expensive with any
other IVR system.
Distributed IVR
The cost of a proprietary IVR system is such that when a company with many small
retail locations wants to provide IVR, it is forced to transfer callers to a central
server to process the transactions. With Asterisk, it becomes possible to distribute
the application to each node and, thus, handle the requests locally. Literally thou-
sands of little Asterisk systems deployed at retail locations across the world could
serve up IVR functionality in a way that would be impossible to achieve with any
other system. No more long-distance transfers to a central IVR server, no more
huge trunking facility dedicated to the task—more power with less expense.
These are three rather simple examples of the potential of Asterisk.

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