I’ve been working with Techhouse’s phone system. They have an Asterisk setup with VoIP phones in the library, kitchen, and workroom. Asterisk supports this feature called AGI scripting (presumably a parallel acronym to CGI scripting, and it does perform a similar function). You can write your AGI scripts in whatever language, and I of course choose Python.<p/>

Anyway, when the extension is transferred to my Python script, it currently says “Type a digit,” waits for the user to type a digit, and then repeats the digit that was typed. Beautiful! This means that we can do almost anything we want.<p/>

Okay, so now that there’s a framework, we need ideas. I can’t think of anything cool to do. I guess the fundamental question is, what do you want to do with a phone that you don’t want to do with a computer (or can’t, because there’s no computer nearby) – information that would be handy to have at your fingertips. Hmm…<p/>