Speech Server 2007 marries FreeSwitch - Part 1 - Introduction
For quite some time now, I have been developing an application that is a cross between a web site and an IVR app. The web site is an ASP.NET application and the IVR part is a Speech Server 2007 managed code application. The site is located at www.VerbalBusiness.com
The basic idea behind the site is that you setup your information at www.VerbalBusiness.com and then you can verbally access or add to your information while you are on the go by dialling a telephone number from your cell or land line phone.
Until recently both applications ran on a box in my basement, and I had one telephone line that I could use to dial into the application. This was good and cheap for development and initial testing, but obviously I needed to make changes before the applications could be released.
Setting up the web site in a hosted environment was pretty much routine, but I had no clue as to what I was going to do when it came to the telephone lines. You see before I became involved with Speech Server 2007, the only thing I knew about a telephone was that you picked it up and said hello when it rang. As I mentioned in previous blog postings, I have done the telephone lines for my Speech Server applications via a Brooktrout TR1000 board and more recently with a Dialogic Analog Media gateway.
Since I have never really dealt with the SIP end of things, I knew it would be a struggle to get things setup properly. So armed with a few buzz words like SIP, TCP vs. UDP, and Freeswitch I set out upgrade so that my application could be accessed by many users. It took me quite a while, but I finally have things working.
In the next few blog posts I will be documenting my experiences with marrying Speech Server 2007 and FreeSwitch. The instructions that I give will be very in depth and I will not be glossing over any of the details. Hopefully this will make it easier for anyone who is trying to setup FreeSwitch, but most importantly, I know that someday I will have to set everything up again...so I am going to document it all in detail now...so I don’t have to fight with it later.
Please note as you follow along with my instructions that I am no FreeSwitch expert. What I have done is setup FreeSwitch to work with Speech Server 2007, but I am sure there are many areas that could do with improvement...especially security.
I welcome your comments and advice...over time I hope these instructions can be enhanced from others as well
Finally, I would like to thank Marshall Harrison and Jon Poploskie, who both took the time to help me out with my FreeSwitch setup by answering some questions which I am sure were quite trivial.
The next part in this series of blog posts will be called...
Speech Server 2007 marries FreeSwitch - Part 2 - Application Overview & Goals
Thanks for reading