There have been two recent additions to Asterisk trunk which seem interesting. One is called res_phoneprov and allows for auto provisioning of phones. The second is called app_jack and allows you to connect calls via Jack interfaces meaning you could run a call through an effects unit or off to other software.

res_phoneprov: (Written by twilson)

Added a new module, res_phoneprov, which allows auto-provisioning of phones based on configuration templates that use Asterisk dialplan function and variable substitution. It should be possible to create phone profiles and templates that work for the majority of phones provisioned over http. It is currently only intended to provision a single user account per phone. An example profile and set of templates for Polycom phones is provided. NOTE: Polycom firmware is not included, but should be placed in AST_DATA_DIR/phoneprov/configs to match up with the included templates.

phoneprov.conf

app_jack: (Written by Russell b)

Add a new module, app_jack, which provides interfaces to JACK, the Jack Audio Connection Kit (http://www.jackaudio.org/). Two interfaces are provided; there is a JACK() application, and a JACK_HOOK() function. Both interfaces create an input and output JACK port. The application makes these ports the endpoint of the call. The audio coming from the channel goes out the output port and whatever comes back in on the input port is what gets sent to the channel. The JACK_HOOK() function turns on a JACK audiohook on the channel. This lets you run the audio coming from a channel through JACK, and whatever comes back in is what gets forwarded on as the channel's audio. This is very useful for building custom vocoders or doing recording or analysis of the channel's audio in another application.

In case anyone is curious, the platform that inspired me to write this is PureData (http://puredata.info/). I wrote these JACK interfaces so that I could use Pd to do interesting things with the audio of phone calls ...

Update

Russell caught me on IRC to let you know he has a blog article about the new app_jack system.

Excerpt:

I recently learned about PureData, so very quickly I wanted to be able to get phone calls in and out of Pd (PureData). After exploring various options, JACK turned out to be the obvious choice for providing audio transport between Asterisk and Pd. I have been wanting to build some interesting applications in Pd that do audio analysis and manipulation, but I had some infrastructure work to complete first.

So, I wrote app_jack. This module provides two interfaces between Asterisk and JACK. The first is an Asterisk application, JACK(). The second interface is a dialplan function, JACK_HOOK().

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