Later this week, as part of this year's Libre Software Meeting, being
held in Metz, France, I will demonstrate functional GNU Bayonne
integration with the OpenH323 stack. This work was largely developed by
Mark Lipscombe over the past few months, and should become generally
available in preliminary form, along with many other new features, as
part of our next major GNU Bayonne release this August, during
LinuxWorld in San Francisco.
GNU Bayonne is the script driven telephony application server of the GNU
project, and historically has enabled the creation of original telephony
application services that could run unmodified on both analog and
digital telephone lines using hardware from various CTI vendors under
GNU/Linux. With the introduction of Openh323 support, it is now
possible to create a deploy both existing and new GNU Bayonne
applications in a pure IP telephony environment without requiring any
additional hardware. One will also be able to create applications that
work identically in both traditional telephone environments and over
H.323 session for mixed environment deployments.
Since GNU Bayonne can interconnect H.323 sessions as well as provide
interactive or automated voice response, one should be able to create
H.323 proxy services using it. With Bayonne's soon to be introduced web
scripting, it will become easy to create switchboard type applications
that sit in the DMZ and allow both the placement of outside calls
through firewalls, and automated reception of inbound call traffic which
may then be directed to internal H.323 stations or call agents such as
for IP ACD call agent functionality. One application I would like for
us to demonstrate this August at LinuxWorld is the recently developed
GNU/Bayonne "DAISY" talking book reader, but operating over H.323.
With the elimination of hardware requirements when used as a H.323
application server, it is worth noting that GNU Bayonne has already been
successfully ported to xBSD variants such as FreeBSD, as well as to
Macos/x, and in the past has been ported to Solaris. It should now also
be possible to offer useful voice application services with GNU Bayonne
on virtualized GNU/Linux environments, such as offered in S/390 Linux.
As noted, there are a number of additional areas of active GNU Bayonne
development, including automatic speech recognition. further PBX
functionality, web services integration, and externalized scripting.
Some of these things will be part of the August release, and some may
appear later this summer. Further information about GNU Bayonne may be
found at the mailing list, by sending a request to
address@hidden, or by sending email to
address@hidden