asterisk users - Oct 2016 - Synchronous dialplan execution for feedback while processing speech recognition and voice synth, for example.

I've got an agi that recognises speech (via Google) and another that turns
text into speech (tts) (via Microsoft Translate).

Both are web APIs, both called via seperate python AGIs.

I've googled and I'm probably missing something pretty newbie 101 here,
but
is there any way, or fiddle, that I can play some audio to let the caller
know that their weather forecast is being fetched, which the two agis are
first recognising and then synthesizing the speech? I thought
"background"
might do it, but it doesn't seem to work like that.

Both agis take about 2.5 seconds, so that's 5 seconds of silence.

Yes, I'm aware of software applications that will quickly recognise and
synthesize speech on the local machine, but they're not suitable for the
application.

I realise there's probably a pythonic way of forking processes, but the way
it is now, both agis are nice seperate single purpose functions and it all
just looks quite neat as it is.

Many thanks.
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On Mon, 3 Oct 2016, Jonathan H wrote:
> I've googled and I'm probably missing something pretty newbie 101
here,
> but is there any way, or fiddle, that I can play some audio to let the 
> caller know that their weather forecast is being fetched, which the two 
> agis are first recognising and then synthesizing the speech? I thought 
> "background" might do it, but it doesn't seem to work like
that.?
Did something similar a decade ago :)

I had a credit card processing AGI for an adult audiotext line. The owner 
was a real stickler for the 'caller experience' and didn't like the
dead
air waiting for the auth back from the card processor.

My solution was to kick off a thread (the AGI was written in C, so I used 
pthreads) to play 'and get ready for a good time' and then issue the 
request to the card processor and waiting for the response in the mainline 
code.

By the time the prompt finished, I had the response so pthread_join would 
'finish' off the thread cleanly and the dead air magically disappeared.

The only 'warning' is not to do any I/O to STDIN/STDOUT in the mainline
--
that would violate the AGI protocol and lead to things breaking in weird 
ways.

-- 
Thanks in advance,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
             https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-edwards-4244281

Right, well I tried a few things (I mean, days of things) and this is
what I came up with.

2 Questions:
1: Is there a simpler way?
2: Is there a trick to pass back a variable to the calling channel,
rather than setting a global?

(This is for an agi process that can take up to ten seconds to query a
web API and come back with a list of maybe ten items).

[synctest3a]
; starts a new channel on 3b and sets the variable it's going to need
using "b" param
; starts music class using "m" param, and then makes the call

exten => s,1,Answer()
    same => n,Dial(Local/s at
synctest3b,,gm(wait-long-process)b(synctest3b^setVar^1(from
calling channel)))
    same => n,Verbose(1,${test}) ; set by the global in 3b
    same => n,Set(GLOBAL(test)="") ; stop it polluting other calls
    same => n,Hangup()

[synctest3b]
; kicks into action with some long process (agi for example)
; when process is complete, it answers the call and sets global
; it then hangs up, music on hold stops, 3a resumes

exten => s,1,Wait(2)
    same => n,Verbose(1,${testVar})
    same => n,Set(GLOBAL(test)=true) ;
    same => n,Answer()
    same => n,Hangup()
exten => setVar,1,Set(testVar=${ARG1}) ; setter
    same => n,Return()

On 3 October 2016 at 23:48, Steve Edwards <asterisk.org at sedwards.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Oct 2016, Jonathan H wrote:
>
>> I've googled and I'm probably missing something pretty newbie
101 here,
>> but is there any way, or fiddle, that I can play some audio to let the
>> caller know that their weather forecast is being fetched, which the two
agis
>> are first recognising and then synthesizing the speech? I thought
>> "background" might do it, but it doesn't seem to work
like that.
>
>
> Did something similar a decade ago :)
>
> I had a credit card processing AGI for an adult audiotext line. The owner
> was a real stickler for the 'caller experience' and didn't like
the dead air
> waiting for the auth back from the card processor.
>
> My solution was to kick off a thread (the AGI was written in C, so I used
> pthreads) to play 'and get ready for a good time' and then issue
the request
> to the card processor and waiting for the response in the mainline code.
>
> By the time the prompt finished, I had the response so pthread_join would
> 'finish' off the thread cleanly and the dead air magically
disappeared.
>
> The only 'warning' is not to do any I/O to STDIN/STDOUT in the
mainline --
> that would violate the AGI protocol and lead to things breaking in weird
> ways.
>
> --
> Thanks in advance,
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867
PST
>             https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-edwards-4244281
> --
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