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Ask HN: Open Source Call Routing Software for Text Adventure Game?

Greetings, Simply for fun, I’m interested creating a basic choose-your-own adventure game inside of a regular push-button telephone. Premise is that after some simple directions the user would make decisions in the text-based adventure style (1=yes, 3=no, 2=north, 8=south, 4=west, 6=east, 0=game directions). I suspect this could be made to work using a fairly standard call routing program, so long as the software allows for many levels of menus. Ideally, the software could be run off-line on a raspberry pi. I ask the community because I lack the skills to develop it myself. My background is more closely aligned with the narrative building side of things and I’m hoping someone has experience with a suitable open source option.

iamdave 10y ago
What you're thinking of is called an IVR: Interactive Voice Response. http://www.openvbx.org/ http://www.openvbx.org/ OpenVBX allows you to create an IVR (layman translation: phone tree) where you can plug in "press 1 and go here, press 2 and go here" via the web interface. You'll need a Twilio account and API key for it to work, but both are easy enough to setup. Feel free to reach out if you'd like any help or want pointers. If you want to do this programmatically (which I'd advise given how complex this could get), I refer you to the Twilio API docs for building an IVR in PHP (other languages available): https://www.twilio.com/docs/tutorials/walkthrough/ivr-phone-tree/php/laravel https://www.twilio.com/docs/tutorials/walkthrough/ivr-phone-...
eb0la 10y ago
If you can provide the sound files, something like Asterisk + PHPivr[1] could work for you. Problem: It's quite old (2010). If you need text-to-speech thats could be a problem. Text-to-speech needs good software. Maybe you can call Microsoft or Google text-to-speech API and cache replies (I don't know if this is allowed under their ToS). Finally you could try a platform like Twilio and make ir point to your app endpoint. This could be a static site (made with hugo/jeckyln/vim) or a dynamic one. [1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/phpivr/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/phpivr/ Just make a static site with HUGO/Jeckyln, host it somewhere
germinalphrase 10y ago
Thank you both for the suggestions. I would be using prerecorded sound files and will dig into your recommendations.

iamdave 10y ago

What you're thinking of is called an IVR: Interactive Voice Response. http://www.openvbx.org/ http://www.openvbx.org/ OpenVBX allows you to create an IVR (layman translation: phone tree) where you can plug in "press 1 and go here, press 2 and go here" via the web interface. You'll need a Twilio account and API key for it to work, but both are easy enough to setup. Feel free to reach out if you'd like any help or want pointers. If you want to do this programmatically (which I'd advise given how complex this could get), I refer you to the Twilio API docs for building an IVR in PHP (other languages available): https://www.twilio.com/docs/tutorials/walkthrough/ivr-phone-tree/php/laravel https://www.twilio.com/docs/tutorials/walkthrough/ivr-phone-...

eb0la 10y ago

If you can provide the sound files, something like Asterisk + PHPivr[1] could work for you. Problem: It's quite old (2010). If you need text-to-speech thats could be a problem. Text-to-speech needs good software. Maybe you can call Microsoft or Google text-to-speech API and cache replies (I don't know if this is allowed under their ToS). Finally you could try a platform like Twilio and make ir point to your app endpoint. This could be a static site (made with hugo/jeckyln/vim) or a dynamic one. [1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/phpivr/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/phpivr/ Just make a static site with HUGO/Jeckyln, host it somewhere

germinalphrase 10y ago

Thank you both for the suggestions. I would be using prerecorded sound files and will dig into your recommendations.