Newfies-Dialer is a free and open source voice broadcast application, which can fulfil a variety of roles for a range of industries and organisations who wish to contact large numbers of people by phone in a short space of time.
The Newfies-Dialer aplication has been built using a messaging system so that it can support distributed processing on cloud servers. The platform is focused on real-time operations and task call distributions to clustered brokers and workers meaning that many millions of calls can be processed daily.
Newfies-Dialer can be installed on a standalone server for smaller deployments. It currently utilises the Freeswitch Telephony engine (http://www.freeswitch.org) to process the the outbound calls. However support for other telephony engines, such as Asterisk may be added in the future.
Newfies-Dialer is written in Python using the Django Framework, and operates with message brokers such as RabbitMQ and Redis using the emerging open standard for messaging middleware, AMPQ (Advance Messaging Queuing Processing). Beanstalk, MongoDB, CouchDB and DBMS can also be supported.
In order to communicate with external systems, Newfies-Dialer has been released with a substantial set of API's to easily integrate the platform with third-party applications.
Newfies-Dialer is supplied with a comprehensive administrative and user interface which allows you and your customers to create outbound call campaigns, add phonebooks, subscribers, as well as record audio messages and design more complex IVR (Interactive Voice Response) applications. When ready and tested, the campaign can be launched from the interface.
Newfies-Dialer was commissioned by a charity named Kubatana (http://www.kubatana.net) based in Zimbabwe, which sponsors the Freedomfone project (http://www.freedomfone.org/) dedicated to providing information via phone technology.
In less economically developed countries, Internet is often limited and illiteracy rates may be high, but there is usually comprehensive mobile phone coverage. Freedomfone will use Newfies-Dialer to dial up people’s phones and offer health information on Cholera, Malaria and so many other avoidable health issues in the third world, which may be alleviated simply by education.
Newfies-Dialer was so named after the Newfoundland Dog nicknamed Newfies and used by sea rescue services around the world.
The Newfies-Dialer project is supported by Star2billing S.L. For more information, see http://www.star2billing.com
NGOs :
- The platform can be used to offer complex data collection, voting applications, notification for availability of supplies and dissemination of health information.
Marketing :
- Newfies-Dialer is a telephony based marketing tool to deliver advertising to company contacts.
Emergency :
- Provide a message delivery platform to quickly and efficiently send messages to communities.
Finance :
- Debt Recovery and Reminders, this can be easily integrated with call centre software and processes.
Health & Welfare :
- Deliver appointment reminders to patients of dentists, doctors and other organisations.
User : The Person configuring the campaigns and wishing to deliver messages.
Subscriber : Person who will receive the message.
Administrator : Person administering the platform, usually with root permissions.
Gateway : Peer which will outbound a call and deliver the message to the subscriber.
Phonebook : Group of subscribers, this is used to define the subset of subscribers that will receive the message.
CDR : Call Detail Record, keep track of the calls performed by the system, eventually can be used for monitoring and billing purposes.
Call Request : Describes the request to the system to run a call to a subscriber.
Audio Application : This can be a simple audio delivery, a routing to another gateway, forwarded to a Call-Centre, in fact, any to any application that can be built on Freeswitch.
Dialer Settings : Each customer needs to have Dialer Settings and trunks associated with their account. These set the limit to which each customer can utilise Newfies-Dialer in terms of trunks, calls per minute, call duration, subscribers and campaigns, as well as blacklisting or whitelisting phone numbers.
Newfies is a django based application, so the major requirements are :
- python >= 2.4
- Apache / http server with WSGI modules
- Django Framework >= 1.3
- Celery >= 2.2
The rest of the requirements can easily be installed with PIP (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip) :
Newfies-Dialer takes advantage of messaging systems such as RabbitMQ or Redis. Other alternatives provided by Celery (http://celeryproject.org) are also supported.
- Install RabbitMQ or Redis : https://github.com/Star2Billing/newfies-dialer/blob/master/docs/source/broker/broker-installation.rst
Installation scripts are provided to install Newfies-Dialer
Complete documentation :
Beginner's Guide :
- User Interface :
- http://localhost:9080/ This application provides a User interface for restricted management of the User's Campaign, Phonebook, Subscriber. It also provides detailed Reporting of calls and message delivery.
- Admin Interface :
- http://localhost:9080/admin/ This interface provides user (ACL) management, a full control of all Campaigns, Phonebooks, Subscribers, Gateway, configuration of the Audio Application.
This project is PEP8 compilant and please refer to these sources for the Coding Conventions :
Fork the project on GitHub : https://github.com/Star2Billing/newfies
License : AGPL (https://raw.github.com/Star2Billing/newfies-dialer/master/COPYING)
Website : http://www.newfies-dialer.org
Star2Billing S.L. (http://www.star2billing.com) offers consultancy including installation, training and customization
Please email us at [email protected] for more information