Ok coolio

Well we have done quite a bit lately.

First, the in home Asterisk (www.asterisk.org, http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk) server is now working.

1. Normal phone connection over POTS with VoiceMail application using a Wildcard X100P. There seems to be some signalling issues. I can pick up the phone from another location in the house and the server still goes through its routine. There will need to be some check just before the server picks up the line to see if the line has already been picked up.
2. A IAX2 connection to Voicepulse's connect service. This has been an excellent service.
3. After connecting the Voicepulse service, created and tested with 3 people, Asterisk's MeetMe application. You can have as many people connected to the IAX2 connection as the server/bandwidth will handle. Pretty damn cool.
4. I also connected IAX2 connections to iaxtel.com and FreeworldDialup, but these connections are not as reliable as the Voicepulse's connection - maybe since they are free services.
5. Connected the front page of Qagwaai.com, to show connectivity to FreeworldDialup's service.
6. Installed and got working FWD X-Lite, and was able to dial-in to my Asterisk Server.
7. Worked with Asterisk's connection to Festival. This largely turned into a hunt for patches to Festival for Asterisk. The end result was a very poor quality connection. Ended up pre-generating the voice files in 16-bit 8,000hrz mono wav files and storing them on the server. We will need to figure this one out for a complete Marid-Asterisk installation. There currently is a 0.95 beta of Festival, which does not have an Asterisk patch.
8. Lastly, got an AGI connection from the Asterisk Server to the Marid Server, to pull the number of messages in my inbox. This uses a shell script to spin up a JVM which makes an Axis call. It takes about 2 seconds to spin up the JVM and then less than a second to actually communicate. So, the AGI works like this:
1. Stream "You have"
2. make Axis call and return a Number which is used in the Say Digits agi command.
3. Stream "Messages"

Lessons learned:

1. Documentation help is required everywhere. I have relied on www.voip-info.org's wiki for many answers and hopefully posted some useful information.
2. Voip is not everything it has been billed - yet.

Next, to add to Marid, is more interfaces to intelligently allow an Asterisk server to ask for information. The concept of a "Front" or human interaction has come into play when designing the personal messenger, but it seems like this needs to be fleshed out for more than just web based interactions.