Page 423 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Executes an AGI-compliant program across the network. This application is very sim-
ilar to AGI(), except that it calls a specially written FastAGI script across a network
connection. The main purposes for using FastAGI are to offload CPU-intensive AGI
scripts to remote servers and to help reduce AGI script startup times (the FastAGI
program is already running before Asterisk connects to it).

FastAGI() tries to connect directly to the running FastAGI program, which must already
be listening for connections on the specified port on the server specified by hostname.
If port is not specified, it defaults to port 4573. If script is specified, it is passed to the
FastAGI program as the agi_network_script variable. The arguments specified by
args will be passed to the program.

See agi/fastagi-test in the Asterisk source directory for a sample FastAGI
script. This should serve as a good roadmap for writing your own
FastAGI programs.

Returns -1 if the application requested a hangup, or 0 on a non-hangup exit.
; connect to the sample fastagi-test program, which must already be running
; on the local machine
exten => 123,1,Answer()
exten => 123,2,FastAGI(agi://localhost)
; connect to a FastAGI script on a host named "calvin" on port 8000, and
pass along
; a script name of "testing", with the argument "12345"
exten => 124,1,Answer()
exten => 124,2,FastAGI(agi://calvin:8000/testing,12345)

See Also
AGI(), DeadAGI()

Festival() Uses the Festival text-to-speech engine to read text to the caller
Festival(text[,intkeys])

Connects to the locally running Festival server, sends it the text specified by text, and
plays the resulting sound file back to the user. This application allows the caller to press
a key (specified by intkeys) to immediately stop the playback and return the value of
intkeys. If intkeys is set to any, Festival() will send control of the channel to the
extension entered by the user.
See Chapter 14 for more in-depth information on using Festival with Asterisk and the
README.festival file located in the contrib/ subdirectory of the Asterisk source.
You must start the Festival server before starting Asterisk, and you must use the
Answer() application to answer the channel before calling Festival().

Festival() | 395