Adhearsion


Adhearsion is an open source voice development framework for the Ruby programming language. It is intended to be used to create rich voice applications integrated with other technologies, such as web applications, databases and instant messaging.

History

Adhearsion was created in 2006 and released by Jay Phillips in December of that year as an open source project.
In August 2007 O'Reilly Media published the Asterisk The Future of Telephony book that included Adhearsion.
In December 2009 Pearson Education published the Practical Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6: From Beginner to Expert book that included a section on installing Adhearsion and configuring it for use with Asterisk 1.4 and 1.6.
The latest major version, 2.0.0, was released in April 2012 and includes many substantial improvements over 1.x. The current development target is 3.0.0.

Overview

Adhearsion is an entirely independent framework, including application and code generators and a plugin system. Today Adhearsion works with the Asterisk telephony engine, as well as with and FreeSWITCH through the open source and requires Ruby 1.9.3 or higher.
The framework allows developers to create stand-alone voice applications, or add voice functionality to existing applications or systems using a modern dynamic programming language, Ruby, as opposed to requiring the use of VXML or CCXML. Adhearsion provides a set of classes and facilities that enables a developer to work with voice with little knowledge of the voice development domain.
Since both Adhearsion and all of its dependencies are open source, developers have the ability to develop sophisticated voice applications without significant up front costs that have been the historical norm in telephony development.
The current members that make up the core team are Ben Klang and Ben Langfeld.