RailsConf 2007 • May 17, 2007 - May 20, 2007 • Portland, Oregon

Session

respond_to :voice—The Convergence of Voice and Web Interfaces with Rails and Asterisk

Jonathan Palley, Co-founder, Idapted Inc

Date: Friday, May 18
Time: 10:45am - 11:35am
Location: Oregon Ballroom 203

Until now, Rails' MVC framework has largely been utilized to create web facing applications. However, voice, via the explosion of VoIP, is rapidly emerging as a new type of "view." This talk will explore how Rails, using a new plugin framework, Telegraph, and the open source server Asterisk, enables the rapid development of voice-based interfaces and applications. Telegraph combines a RJS-like DSL for constructing interactive voice "view" with a special model-like object for manipulating Asterisk server data.

The talk will begin by rapidly covering the fundamentals of VoIP and Asterisk and then move onto the design goals of Telegraph, the Asterisk DSL for Rails. A sequence of demonstrations on how voice applications and interfaces can be developed will follow, and we'll demonstrate "real-world" multinational applications that are currently using the plugin and discuss the findings and challenges of their implementations.