Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]

CommentCasting

Developed as a Final Year Project for B.Eng. in Digital Media Engineering in the School of Electronic Engineering at Dublin City University.

Latest News

CommentCasting was awarded the ‘Ericsson Medal’ in November 2006 for best final year project from the School of Electronic Engineering. The award was judged by a panel of managers from Ericsson LMI and was commended on its commercial potential.

Project Brief

Telephone private branch exchange systems (PBXs) have been present in the business environment since the early 1980s. Since then, PBX vendors have introduced radical changes to their architectures based on the development of IP-based enterprise networks with the bandwidth, delay characteristics and reliability to support voice communications, however, most such systems are based on proprietary hardware/software, are expensive and often difficult to adapt to specific enterprise requirements. In the spirit of increasing openness in the telecoms arena, a telecoms platform based on open source software and inexpensive interface hardware has been developed. This software, ‘Asterisk’, allows management of both TDM and packet voice, while offering a highly flexible platform for PBX and telephony applications.

This project is to design and demonstrate a novel Web/Telephony service, of the student’s design, by adding functionality to an Asterisk PBX. The environment will include a number of hard and soft handsets interfacing with Asterisk. The new service should involve handsets interacting with a web-based service that provides some element of the service control or execution.

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Project Implementation

CommentCasting: Allowing Listeners to Phone Comments into Podcasts

Time shifted audio presents a problem that live radio has always avoided. Unlike streaming broadcasts, the show has already happened in the past, leaving listeners who wish to contribute unable to phone-in.

Market potential was identified in developing a novel system for podcasters to allow their listeners to take an active role in a time shifted radio show. The integrated web/telephony service enables listeners to dial-in to record voice comments on their cell phone, once moderated by the host the audio clips are embedded in the show feed and ‘pushed’ to all show subscribers iPod’s. The term ‘CommentCasting’ was coined for this application.

The technology is adaptable for any service required to record live audio from their cell phone into an RSS feed. Examples included live reporting from a sporting event, audio dating ads, public traffic reports, breaking news, announcements or requests etc.

Use Case Scenario
CommentCasting has been designed to make recording comments as easy as possible. No additional equipment is required, only a standard mobile phone or landline. During a podcast show, and on their website, podcasters advertise the CommentCasting phone number and their individual show ID. The instructions are also automatically appended onto the end of the show notes in the description field for each episode.

Feed Subscription
Podcasters create a link on their website to their RSS feed using the CommentCasting subscription button pictured in figure 3. Visitors who wish to subscribe to the podcast copy the URL into their client application as common with subscribing to any podcast.

Recording A Comment
When a listener feels emotive on a subject during playback they may pause the show and dial the CommentCasting number. They are greeted by a voice prompt requesting them to enter the 3 digit identification number of the podcast they wish to select. Having keyed in the number, a further voice prompt requests them to record their comment after the ‘beep’ and press the ‘#’ key when done. Following their comment, a voice confirms their comment has been saved and show owner notified.

Moderation & Publishing
On receipt of a comment, the system sends a notification email to the show owners registered email address, requesting them to log into their administrators dashboard to preview the file. This measure is required to ensure that audio recordings are moderated for both entertainment value & content as once published they will be automatically downloaded to every subscribers desktop. If the file is suitable, the show owner clicks the publish button adding it to the RSS feed available for all subscribers.

Listening to Comments
Comments are downloaded into the client audio application as they get published in the feed. The client application will notify the listener of a new episode or comment and transfer it if applicable to their mobile audio device.

Administration Area: http://www.commentcasting.bytesurgery.com