[ale] audible caller id

[Geoffrey]

tfreeman at intel.digichem.net wrote:
> Hmmm. That audible caller id & voice/fax stuff sounds interesting. Is 
> there a howto or other documentation somewhere, or should somebody 
> encourage you to perform the public service? 8-)

I'm planning on having it on all my lines (3), that way I can get rid of 
all these auto telemarketers.

It's really not all that difficult.  You obviously need a modem that 
supports caller id.  I'm using an external USR 56k fax modem.

There are various getty packages, but I use mgetty.  In the setup of 
mgetty, you tell it all kinds of things, one of which is, what to 
execute when you get a call.  I pass it the name of a perl script that 
looks at the caller id info, and based on it, will decide whether to 
answer the call as a fax, or just let it ring.  Here's the beginning of 
the script to give you an idea: (I hate posting perl, as Fletch always 
makes it better. :) Hey fletch, note my use of 'use strict'):

#!/usr/bin/perl

# use diagnostics;
use strict;

# Usage callerid.pl from_tty calling_number name dist_ring_id called_no;

sub rejected {

     my ($na, $nu) = @_;
     print FH "REJECT: \"$na\" from: <$nu>\n";
     `/home/esoteric/shl/text2talk "Call rejected from $na"&`;

     close(FH);
     exit 1;
}

sub accepted {

     my ($na, $nu) = @_;
     print FH "Accept: \"$na\" from: <$nu>\n";
     `/home/esoteric/shl/text2talk "Call accepted from $na"&`;

     close(FH);
     exit 0;
}

open(FH, ">> /home/esoteric/memo/callerid.lst");

my ($tty, $num, $name, $dist_ring, $called_no);

($tty, $num, $name, $dist_ring, $called_no) = @ARGV;
printf FH scalar(localtime()) . " : ";

# if my mother-in-law is calling, reject the call

if ($num == /7775551212/) { reject($name, $num); }


 From there you just call accept() or reject() one you've decided (based 
on the caller id info) whether to answer the call or not.  mgetty reads 
the return value of the script in order to determine whether to answer 
the call.

Further it calls another script that calls festival.  Festival is a text 
to voice engine.  There are rpm's available, but none that will work 
with Mandrake 9.0.  I'm working on building it from source.

I'd be glad to share further info with anyone who would like to leverage 
this.

Oh yeah, the text2talk script mentioned in the perl script calls a 
festival binary like this:

echo "(SayText \"$*\")" | festival --pipe

Cool and simple huh?


-- 
Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at 3times25.net

I didn't have to buy my radio from a specific company to listen
to FM, why doesn't that apply to the Internet (anymore...)?


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