Virtual softphone idea

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 05, 2005 Posts: 3

I've read the limitations of the Softphone - $10 for 500 minutes. I'm thinking that I could make my own virtual softphone.

Hardware:
- Linux computer with extra sound card
- this thing: http://www.nch.com.au/hardware/callrec.html - it connects to the phone line and provides a 3.5mm analog plug to conenct to the sound card's record port
- a way for the sound card's output to be connected to the phone line
- tons of hacks... to record audio, to play audio, to dial numbers, etc
- a serial port thing that controls when the phone should be on/off hook
- a way to read DTMF tones and parse them. I could have a landline and it could be a PBX and call anywhere. Or I could even utilize 3-way calling and make free calls from anywhere.

This would be great. I could even have people call PSTN from the Internet. Like I could hack up Skype a little bit and run Skype on my computer.

I read a tutorial to hack up an old cordless phone to connect to the computer. I could get something in that.

Anyway, I'm pretty good at scripting/programming Linux. So that'd be helpful.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 05, 2005 Posts: 3

How convenient. I look at slashdot and find this: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/05/1212200&tid=222&tid=215

Posts: 230 · Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:03 am Post subject:

Asterisk

Posts: 497 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Apr 29, 2005 Posts: 497

If you used a program like Skype could you use a voice modem and have Skypes sound directed to it?

I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to this so it's just a thought.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 05, 2005 Posts: 3

arcking wrote:

If you used a program like Skype could you use a voice modem and have Skypes sound directed to it?

I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to this so it's just a thought.

I don't know how to make my voice modem a sound device in Linux. But, I have 2 sound cards so that isn't a problem for me.