asterisk users - Jul 2008 - Documentation for realtime text support in Asterisk

Friends,

Asterisk 1.6 and trunk has got a lot of new functionality in regards  
to support for TDD in VoIP. We now can handle calls with text streams  
for deaf and hearing-impaired in a standardized way, using the ITU T. 
140 standard. Asterisk has become the reference implementation for  
this work. I hope that we've set a new standard that other project  
will follow, being inspired by our code. I would also point out that  
there are market oppurtunities here for everyone running VoIP services.

Please check
http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/trunk/doc/realtimetext.txt?view=co
for more information.

Future work in this area involves gateway functionality between old  
TDD phones (connected to DAHDI/ZAP channels) and modern SIP based  
phones with text support. We're also looking into gateways to SIP  
message and Jabber messaging.

As part of this project we have made Asterisk accept calls without  
audio, which might sound strange. Telephone calls without any audio?
Well, some of these users wants video and text only, since audio  
doesn't really mean anything for them, it is just a waste of precious  
bandwidth.

We hope that many users will benefit from this work!

Regards,
/Olle Johansson, Edvina & Gunnar Hellstr?m, Omnitor