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OpenPhone is an open source telephone based information dissemination environment that is aimed at addressing the significant African need related to the information empowerment of its people. The system aims to make it easy and inexpensive for organizations and individuals to perform information transactions on the telephone – that is, make information available to callers, and to gather information from callers. Doing this in a developing and multi cultural multi-lingual context is very challenging. Not only does South Africa’s unique diversity calls for in depth knowledge of our human factors, language and multi-cultural aspects but also for investigating how technology can be applied within this developing context. This project is a culmination of open source technologies, human language technologies, HCI research, social research and open source principles. It investigates the human and cultural factors that need to be considered when developing an information transaction platform

The core of OpenPhone is the Asterisk PBX open source system (www.asterisk.org) . Asterisk does voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware. DialogPalette is a graphical user interface to Asterisk and allows a user to easily create telephony applications. It can be conceptualised as an authoring tool for telephony applications. The Asterisk system has been expanded to use FLITE , a text to speech (TTS) engine designed by Carnegie Mellon University. Flite enables the OpenPhone system to convert text to speech using a computer generated voice.

DialogPalette

DialogPalette is a powerful and easy to use integrated development environment for visually creating telephonic IVR applications running on the Asterisk open-source software PBX. It utilizes an intuitive mouse-driven interface in conjunction with dynamic support dialogs and flexible application "building blocks", called Event Nodes, to graphically create speech-based applications. Traditionally, developing telephonic speech applications requires hours of programming and studying cryptic grammar and transition scripting languages. Furthermore, debugging such applications can be problematic and time consuming, as often the application must first be deployed on a remote server in order to be tested.

To solve this problem, DialogPalette integrates Asterisk into its design environment, using the computer's sound card and microphone to accurately simulate a caller's experience when interacting with your application, while allowing you to graphically follow the call flow via an on-screen canvas.

The latest version of Dialogue Palatte can be downloaded here.