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Introduction

Axiavoice is a telephony server, aimed at interactive phone applications.

It makes use of a number of interfaces (ISDN or VoIP based) to handle incoming or outgoing calls, and launches scripts (which are standalone executable programs) to handle various applications.

Routing and script management are done using a MySQL database.

Interfaces

Axiavoice is able to do in software what most other IVR systems do in hardware, like ISDN signalling and DTMF recognition. Thus, Axiavoice is far more flexible, and can use much cheaper interface boards. Here is a list of the various "board drivers" that Axiavoice includes :

• sock_isdn : this is a generic driver for ISDN boards. The kernel driver has just to provide one network interface for each timeslot. We currently support the HFC-based BRI boards, and a custom 4xE1/T1 PRI board.
• otx : this driver supports the Thor family of adapters, sold by Odin Telesystems.
• i4l : this driver handles any isdn4linux compatible board (that can do voice, of course). It has been tested with HiSax. There are some limitations in signalling, though.
• sip : this is a preliminary driver for SIP (VoIP) communications. It has been tested with 3Com and AdTech SIP phones.
• Some other are planned : H.323, Dialogic...

Of course, Axiavoice can run multiple instances of any interface at any time. This is fully application-transparent. On-the-fly sound conversion allows for flawless direct connections between any channel on any interface. Thus Axiavoice can act as a multiprotocol phone gateway.

Applications

Axiavoice doesn't do much by itself. It will answer a call only if a matching script is found in its database. If so, the script will be launched (as an independant process), will connect to the server, and begin processing, with instructions like "PromptPlay" or "GetDtmf".

Applications can be written in virtually any language. A C library is provided, which can be interfaced to any other language, compiled (like Pascal/gcc) or not (like Perl). However, it's important to note that non-compiled applications should only happen in low volume situations (less than 20 concurrent channels or so).

VoiceXML is now supported, thanks to the Open Source OpenVXI library.

Management

Axiavoice has built-in remote management features, based on SNMP. It allows the administrator to monitor resource usage (how many channels are busy, which script they run, etc.), as well as order the server to refuse new calls, drop active ones, etc.