Jailbreaking OpenVBX
September 21st, 2011 by cmatthieuRemember when the iPhone was only available on AT&T? That was true until October 11, 2009 when a young coder named geohot (and friends) released the first iPhone/iPod jailbreak. Suddenly iPhones weren’t tied to to just AT&T…now you could give AT&T the boot and choose Verizon or T-Mobile as your service provider. Score!
In the spirit of geohot’s jailbreaking efforts, the rapscallions at Disruptive Technologies took on the the task of “jailbreaking” OpenVBX.
OpenVBX is a web-based open source phone system. It’s essentially a virtual PHP/MySQL PBX and it’s available for download from GitHub. Users of OpenVBX can make phone calls, send text messages…all very cool.
The catch is…you’re locked into one service provider: Twilio. There’s no way to choose to use another cloud telephony provider…until now.
Today we’re pleased to announce a new fork of OpenVBX that adds support for Tropo. For the first time, users of OpenVBX will have a choice of multiple platforms on which to run it, making it REALLY OpenVBX.
The coders at Disruptive Technologies added full support for the the Tropo API and Phono SIP-based VoIP web phone to the communications layer of the OpenVBX project. Of course, when selecting the Tropo API, users will now get access to all of the more advanced features of the Tropo network: speech recognition and text-to-speech in 24 languages, phone numbers in over 40 countries, international SMS, in/outbound SIP VoIP support, inbound Skype support, multiple phone numbers per callflow script, improved conferencing.
Disruptive Technologies also extended OpenVBX with the VoiceVault API to support Voice Biometrics in password resets. After adding VoiceVault credentials on the API Accounts Tab, the password reset dialog will provide an option to request a phone call to reset your OpenVBX account password.
The OpenVBX fork with Tropo can be found on GitHub. We have sent the maintainer of the OpenVBX project a pull request to merge these updates into the project. The following features and bugfixes have been added to the OpenVBX package:
- Fixed a redirect bug. OpenVBX no longer incorrectly redirects users to 404 pages.
- Fixed bug in Twilio client. 60 seconds after the user has been “inactive”, the client is no longer able to be called for that user. This prevents calling the client if the user has closed their browser. (This also works for the Phono Client)
- Added support for the Tropo API. You can now add a “Tropo API account” on the system settings page, and from the installer. Either a Tropo or Twilio account is required. Included in the new Tropo API additions are:
- Support for Tropo domestic and international phone numbers, on the “numbers” page.
- All applets in the “flows” page now support Tropo JSON as well as TwiML. Any number can be assigned any flow – so a tropo number and a twilio number can both be assigned the same flow.
- Support for existing Tropo numbers & applications. If the user prefers to set up their numbers initially in Tropo.com, the application will see these numbers and they can be assigned a flow within the application.
- Recordings, and Voicemail, as well as outbound dialing with Tropo.
- Several theme changes. The OpenVBX logo has been modified to include both the Tropo and Twilio logo. If only one of the accounts is active, only that logo will show in the VBX logo – so if a user only has a Twilio account, only the Twilio logo will show, and vice versa. Other minor theme changes:
- Several pages in the System Settings tabs have been reworked. Notibly the API accounts page, which now has each API accounts logos.
- Step 3 of the installation has been reworked.
- Several Twilio-specific content has been changed to be more ambiguous.
- Added support for “Phono” browser phone, in addition to the Twilio Client. Any non-Twilio based numbers will use the new Phono browser phone.
This project has since been renamed to TropoVBX. Please refer to the updated blog post and new source code repository on GitHub.
Related posts:
[...] as extend the existing plugins to run on the Tropo platform. Additional links: http://openvbx.org http://blog.tropo.com/2011/09/21/jailbreaking-openvbx/ http://disruptive.io/2011/09/21/voicevault-and-tropo-in-openvbx-2-0/ [...]