What phone server should I use to read data from MySQL [closed]

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I have been task with the mission of creating a phone solution where clients call a number and using the phone keypad they enter a product ID and base on that ID they should hear the product description that is stored as text in MySQL (text to voice). If they are happy with the product or products they will get an email with all the list of product and their details.

Can anyone point me into the right direction on what to use for this phone server?

Note: maybe I just don't know what to call each service, but that is what needs to be accomplish. I am going crazy reading about trunks, pbx and Asterix

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What you are looking for is an Interactive Voice Response system (IVR). There are existing systems that can be programmed for individual applications.

The W3C even has a standard called VoiceXML, which is a standard for interaction between voice systems and computers.

Unfortionately, that is the extent of my knowledge on the topic.

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Honestly, Asterisk is not very difficult to set up and get running for something like this. Get an inexpensive and unlimited inbound SIP channel from Callcentric or another trunk provider, and write your IVR as the default extension in the dialplan.

Don't let yourself get overwhelmed. You only need to define your trunk as a SIP peer in sip.conf to get the box talking to your provider, and the dialplan syntax is very, very simple. You don't really need any other configuration for Asterisk itself, unless you have to use a land line, which would require a digium or sangoma board with fxo ports on it, and configuration of the zaptel drivers within asterisk.

Text to speech isn't likely to be as great as you'd like, but it may not be feasible to record all of the audio files that you'd need. The problem is that cloud IVR providers may not be cost effective for your application.

Any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

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If you don't want to deal with Asterisk, there are other web-based options as well. The one I know the best (because I work there) is Twilio which lets you build phone applications the same way you build web applications. It's much simpler than setting up and hosting your own Asterisk instance and dealing with carrier connections. There are other similar services out there as well.