Adhearsion - next killer app for Ruby?

Foo camp attendee Ben Black alerted me to Adhearsion, a framework for developing applications in the VoIP space. Think of it as a Ruby on Rails for telephony. Developed by Jay Philllps who got frustrated by the slow uptake of Asterisk.

Adhearsion is written in Ruby and lets those even without any VoIP experience write applications intuitively and productively or simply download and use a pre-written solution. With the framework extension architecture, VoIP functionality can now be actually traded around - an issue the VoIP industry has always suffered from.

A fresh, standard Adhearsion system out of the box does what many companies spend thousands on. It includes a wide - and growing - set of features that should not have to be rewritten for every business that wants to implement them. And yes, this is open-source.

Considering Microsoft spent around $800M on Tellme, I look forward to see what kind of applications this leads to, and what value they generate. We often forget the enormous market for telephone based services.

Alexander Mikhalev [11 August 2008 02:52 AM]

Cool this. Artur, thank you for pointing this out.

Dmitry [11 August 2008 06:54 AM]

A new approach for Asterisk services - web applications instead of telco API. See it here: http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2008/07/new-approach-for-telecom-services.html

Alexander Mikhalev [11 August 2008 07:03 AM]

I went to try Adhearsion but their docs seems to be down for a week now.

Scott Ruthfield [11 August 2008 09:28 AM]

There are a few folks starting up in this space: Cloudvox (http://cloudvox.com/) is one Seattle startup from a super-sharp team, I know there's another but I can't remember their name.

And, of course, Ribbit was trying lots of interesting things pre-acquisition - don't know if their strategy will change since BT picked them up.

Bruce Stewart [11 August 2008 11:17 AM]

Adhearsion has been on my radar for awhile now and I definitely think Jay is onto something important here. I'd recommend this recent post of his to anyone interested in working in the open source telephony space:

What We’re Not Admitting about Asterisk
http://jicksta.com/posts/what-were-not-admitting-about-asterisk

jose [31 August 2008 10:48 AM]

Have you heard of SIP Servlets?

Troy [ 4 January 2010 10:40 AM]

FYI, if anyone is trying to setup Adhearsion for the first time, we documented it here:
http://help.cloudvox.com/faqs/getting-started/setup-for-ruby-adhearsion

Jay has done a superb job. It's now our preferred library for Ruby-and Rails-based phone call apps with Cloudvox. Recommended.