Try Jay’s demo at home.

Jay Phillip’s Adhearsion Demo at the Moutain West Ruby Conf

Jay Phillip’s talk at MWRC attempted to get the audience involved in actually running an Adhearsion demo on their own laptops. Unfortunately, the demo at MWRC was plagued with firewall and network problems, but eventually I was able to get it working. Here are the steps needed.

Go ahead, try this at home. It’s a lot of fun.

Step 1—Sign up for an Adhearsion account.

You can do that here: http://adhearsion.com/signup

You will need a skype account to complete the sign-up. After signing up, you should get an email with a link that you need to click before your account is activated. Go ahead and activate the account now.

Step 2—Install the Adhearsion Gem

Run:

   gem install adhearsion

I’m running the 0.8.2 version of the gem.

Step 3—Create an Adhearsion project

Run:

  ahn create project_name

Step 4—Enable the Sandbox

Run:

  cd project_name
  ahn enable component sandbox

Step 5—Edit Your Credentials

Edit the file: components/sandbox/sandbox.yml and update the username and password you used when you created the Adhearsion account in step 1.

Step 6—Create a Dial Plan for the Sandbox

Edit the dialplan.rb file to contain the following:

adhearsion {
  simon_game
}

sandbox {
  play "hello-world" 
}

The adhearsion section should alread be in the file. You will be adding the sandbox section.

Step 7—Star the Adhearsion Server

Run:

  cd ..
  ahn start project_name

INFO ahn: Adhearsion initialized!

Errors at this stage might mean that your adhearsion account isn’t setup properly, you don’t have the right user name and password (in step 5), or that you have firewall issues preventing you from connecting to the Adhearsion server.

Step 8—Call The Sandbox

Using Skype, call the Skype user named sandbox.adhearsion.com. You should hear a hello world message.

Step 9—Change the Dial Plan

Just for fun, change the dialplan.rb file to contain:

adhearsion {
  simon_game
}

sandbox {
  play "hello-world" 
  play "tt-monkeys" 
}

(Add the tt-monkeys line to the sandbox dial plan).

Now call the sandbox again (skyping user sandbox.adhearsion.com) to hear the change in the dial plan. Monkeys FTW.

More Examples

Here’s a example of what can be done in a dial plan. I was just goofing around with my dial plan.

adhearsion {
  simon_game
}

sandbox {
  play "vm-enter-num-to-call" 
  digits = input 1, :timeout => 10.seconds
  case digits
  when '1'
    play "hello-world" 
  when '2'
    play "tt-monkeys" 
  when '3'
    play "what-are-you-wearing" 
  when '4'
    play 'conf-unmuted'
  when '5'
    play 'tt-weasels'
  when '6'
    play "pbx-invalidpark" 
  when '7'
    play "1000", "dollars" 
  when '8'
    play "followme/sorry" 
  when '9'
    simon_game
  when '0'
    play Time.now
  else
    play "demo-nomatch" 
  end
  sleep 1
  play "demo-thanks" 
}

See http://adhearsion.com/examples for more dialplan examples.

That’s It

Think about what you are doing. You are calling the Adhearsion server and controlling how that remote server responds by the adhearsion program running on your own local box. That is wild.

The adhearsion sandbox makes it easy to play around with telephony programming without any investment in the associated hardware.

I hope this demo encourages you to give Adhearsion a try.

All Rails Conf 2009 speakers are invited to a special event.

Who?

Anyone speaking at RailsConf 2009

When?

Sunday, May 3, 4:00PM – 6:00PM
(The day before RailsConf 2009 officially begins)

Where?

Las Vegas Hilton in Pavilion 1

What?

Presentations for Presenters.

Why?

You’ve come all the way to Las Vegas to tell the world about your latest Ruby/Rails project or idea. You want to make sure that you really get your message across. So, how do you do that?

The Presentations for Presenters session will give you practical tips for improving your RailsConf presentation. We will cover all aspects of planning, preparing, creating and delivering your talk, so that your unique message will get across to your audience.

Plus we will have a lot of fun. Hope to see you there.

What do I need to do?

Start planning now to attend. Since this session is actually the day before RailsConf officially begins, make sure that your travel plans gets you there in time.