Luca Pradovera

In the modern real time communication world, WebRTC is being paired with multiple channels and services to provide an unparalleled customer experience. Utilizing automated speech recognition allows us to build advanced assistive services such as real time captioned phone calls for hearing impaired people, simultaneous translation tools and automated bot assistants. All of that can be achieved leveraging modern open source software such as Adhearsion, the Ruby telephony application framework, FreeSWITCH, Flite, PocketSphinx and (optionally) external APIs such as IBM Watson. Our experience in developing that kind of service will be presented and discussed, plus code samples and a live demo.

Wrapping FreeSWITCH's WebRTC capabilities with Adhearsion acting as the call logic and the "glue" between parts makes creating rich ASR-enabled applications easier. Adhearsion allows you to leverage the full power of Ruby to access APIs, send messaging and updates, and use databases. Integrating FreeSWITCH with third party APIs who do not provide a direct interface, such as IBM Watson and Wit.ai, through Adhearsion and Ruby. ASR and sentiment analysis will provide our IVRs with an unparalleled ability to not only understand what callers say, but also what their desires and intent are. Dialplan applications can be complex to set up to use those APIs, and web applications are not well suited to that type of application. Adhearsion, the Ruby voice application framework, makes it easy and fun!

The presentation will start with a brief panoramic of Adhearsion 2 and how to connect an app to a voice platform, then moving on to real life use cases. A quick look at the future with WebRTC and browser-based services will then let us find out where technology is heading.

Adhearsion is a voice application framework that allows Ruby developers to build complex systems on top of Asterisk, FreeSWITCH and other VoIP platforms, used in the industry for very heterogeneous purposes. Most of it happens behind the scenes and inside calls, through IVR menus and with the notoriously complex CDR output acting as the only trace.

The presentation will start with a brief panoramic of Adhearsion 2 and how to connect an app to a voice platform, then moving on to real life use cases such as pushing events to a browser or a queue, robo-dialing with real time status reporting, and authenticating users by phone number or PIN through a Web API. A quick look at the future with WebRTC and browser-based services will then let us find out where technology is heading.

Demonstration of building applications with the Adhearsion voice application development framework.

Many open source hackers see the allure of building applications that integrate with the telephone network. However layers of industry jargon, proprietary technology and arcane knowledge lead many to believe that telephony is "hard." Adhearsion will change their minds. The Adhearsion project is an open source voice application development framework, the first of its kind in the open source world. In this talk we will build several working voice applications and demonstrate how to integrate them with existing PBX installations. Along the way, we will discuss voice application design and show how to avoid common pitfalls.