Technology overview

Freedom Fone is the result of 3 years of field experience with telephony information services for civil society.

As a result of that experience we have designed a framework to develop new telephony applications for information activists. The main focus of Freedom Fone is to make these new telephony applications widely usable and easy to integrate in Web based applications. For example, the first applications developed using the Freedom Fone development framework, allow media organisations to easily create and conduct polls via SMS, collect opinions via telephone and make those results available online without the need of setting up their own complex telephony platform.

Rather than presenting users with a million options to set up a telephony system, we have opted to design basic but powerful telephony applications that can be used with a great degree of flexibility in most common content management systems.

In its first release Freedom Fone will offer deployers four powerful applications:

1. Voice Menus: easy creation of single layer voice menus with support for low cost GSM devices to handle incoming/outgoing calls. We focus on low power and low cost telephony services in areas with poor Internet infrastructure. Callers to an information service running on Freedom Fone will be able to listen to rich audio content via their mobile or landline phones.
   Read more about how to set up a voice menu and its nodes, then try it out
2. SMS polls: opinion polls can be created in a matter of minutes and results automatically collected and displayed on the Freedom Fone server's screen.
   Read more about how to set up an SMS poll, then try it out
3. Leave-a-Message Voice Menu: the leave a message core application allows users to leave audio messages that can be later managed, tagged and selected by an audio editor for further use. Callers can review their message before saving it.
   Read more about how to set up the Leave-a-Message Voice Menu, then try it out
4. Information callbacks: any audio content can be offered to users by means of phone callbacks, enabling new models of campaigning.
   Read more about how to set up a callback service, then try it out

For a more technical view of the architecture view the schematics published on the Freedom Fone demo website.

Read more detail on the functionality of each of the 4 components on the Freedom Fone demo website.

If you would like to request a new feature to be included in a future version of Freedom Fone, please complete a New Ticket in our Trac's Ticketing System, remembering to select Feature Request (_feature_request) from the Component drop down menu when submitting your request.