The Asterisk community is a vibrant one, one that we actively support through our sponsorship and advocacy of Adhearsion. We have decided to take it a step further and created a Tropo Scripting application that turns Tropo into a giant Asterisk application platform in the cloud.   You can now run just about any Asterisk AGI application on Tropo.

Tropo AGItate was started on the Nerd Bird (good to have in-flight WiFi) from San Jose to Austin, on my way to LoneStar Ruby Conference. Jim Freeze – the organizer of LSRC – had recently been to AdhearsionConf in San Francisco; I wanted to be able to show something extra special during my talk there. On that one flight, I was able to get the basics working and show Tropo emitting AGI during my talk, just like that. (For those non-Asterisk folks out there, AGI is an API that lets external applications connect in to Asterisk and fully control it).

Since then, it’s been fun working on the application and expanding its capabilities. With Tropo AGItate, you could build your own interactive art display, a full blown cloud PBX like OpenVoice, or add Tropo capabilities to your own Asterisk server. The key features coming out today are:

• Tropo can now speak AGI over TCP to any FastAGI server, including Adhearsion, PHPAGI, Asterisk-Java, etc.
• A long list of Asterisk commands are supported, and of course all the Tropo ones.
• While the script is written in Ruby, no Ruby knowledge is necessary to use it. Just point your Tropo application to the Ruby script on Github, upload a configuration file via FTP or WebDAV to your Tropo account, and you are ready.
• Full support of Tropo Speech-Synthesis (TTS) and Speech-Recognition (ASR), but also for Asterisk sound files. Yes, tt-monkeys works!
• Fail over to a SIP URI, in case your FastAGI server does not respond. This could be to another Tropo application, another Asterisk box, or anything that supports SIP.
• You get all of the Tropo channels over AGI, including SMS, Instant Messaging and Twitter, all using the same application.
• Support for custom SIP Headers in and out of Tropo.
• And much more, with more to come…

Not only can you use AGI to write an entire cloud communications application, but you can also seamlessly integrate Tropo services into existing Asterisk systems using the interface you already know and love; after-all, its all SIP to us.

If you want to hear a Tropo AGItate ‘hello world’, give it a ring:

• Phone/SMS: (408) 641-4410
• Skype: +990009369991456829
• SIP: sip:9991456829@sip.tropo.com
• Jabber/XMPP: tropo_agitate@tropo.im

While this is great for all of the Asterisk developers out there, it also gave us the opportunity to showcase the power of the Tropo Scripting API. Tropo AGItate is 100% Tropo Scripting, no special libraries, no tricks, its all right there in the script. Tropo Scripting allows you to bend the Tropo cloud to your will; this is what we believe is truly innovative about our platform.

Stay tuned for more! We will be providing howtos, screencasts and more features soon.

Related posts:

1. Asterisk & Tropo and a Single Adhearsion Dialplan
2. Howto Install and Use Tropo AGItate
3. Update to AGItate
4. Tropo AGItate v0.1.7 Released
5. Outbound with Tropo AGItate

Tags: agi, agitate, asterisk, fastagi, Groovy, Java, PHP, Ruby, scripting, webapi

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