app_confcall a conferencing application for Asterisk®

Submitted by trixter on Thu, 09/20/2007 - 11:25.
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App_confcall is a conferencing application for Asterisk®. This application provides advanced conferencing functionality, enabling more powerful conferencing applications to be performed.

There are a few different conferencing modules for Asterisk®. This article will discuss app_confcall, a previously unreleased conferencing application now available to the Asterisk® community, those that use Asterisk®. A feature matrix of the 3 most popular conferencing solutions for Asterisk® will also be provided so that you as the user can decide which is best for your needs.

Before going further, let me define what a conference application is. It is an application that bridges voice (or potentially video) of 1 or more endpoints with each other. Generally it is dynamic in that users may join or leave during a conference, when one speaks the others hear them. All of the modules that I will talk about currently only support voice, and utilizing Asterisk® can use any channel type that Asterisk® supports. This includes VoIP and TDM, or a mix of the two.

MEETME

Meetme is the default Asterisk® conferencing module, which provides the basic conferencing functionality as well as a few additional features. Generally this is built by default, and available for immediate use.

CONFERENCE

This is a seperate module, which expands upon MeetMe's functionality, and adds a few other features. This is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/appconference/.

CONFCALL

ConfCall is a module written to provide even more flexibility and functionality. As you can see from the feature matrix below, it has many capabilities that are not present in other conferencing solutions. App_confcall may be downloaded at the FreeSWITCH.org's Asterisk Stuff page.

FEATURE MATRIX

  meetme conference confcall
audio x x x
mute x x x
Music when alone x   x
menus x   x
deaf   x x
join/leave sounds x   x
AGI in background     x
Music when muted     x
record name before enter     x
record conference x   x
pins x x x
dynamic conference   x x
close conf when moderators leave x   x
admin ability x   x
background noise reduction     x
selectable context on exit     x
lock conference x   x
adjustable volume per member     x
send dtmf to conference     x
kick users x   x
play sounds     x
manager interface   x x
talker detection   x x
place outbound calls     x
operate without timer   x  
VAD/DTX support   x  

 

Some of the features are quite handy, for example the manager interface allows you to know when things occur in the conference and allow you to programatically respond to events. They can even able more advanced web based solutions to be created. The background noise reduction is also a very nice feature, this will attempt to detect constant background noise levels, and only bridge media to other participants when this level is exceeded. In this way if one participant is in a somewhat noisy environment it does not impair the other participants to hear each other.

By having the ability to select the context that someone goes to when they exit the conference, you get the ability to use the conference app as part of a larger system, perhaps a party line with multiple conference rooms letting you control better callflow when they leave a conference.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

app_confcall was written by Anthony Minessale II, who has contributed to the Asterisk® community by way of modules as well as many core contributions to Asterisk®. Currently he spends most of his time working on FreeSWITCH™, an advanced communications platform enabling embedding into other applications as well as being a standalone softphone, pbx or softswitch. Anthony often helps people with Asterisk® as well as FreeSWITCH™ and participates with OSTAG, the Open Source Telephony Advancement Group. He is committed to further research and development in enabling people to communicate more effectively with less effort.