We sat down with the folks at FreeSWITCH today to get a little behind-the-scenes info now that they have just released version 1.0.1 of their open source telephony platform. If you don’t know much about FreeSWITCH, it was started as a project to be a telephony platform and designed from the ground up based on lessons learned during the development of Asterisk and hopefully avoid many of the problems that plague Asterisk today.

While FreeSWITCH wasn’t originally designed to be a simple PBX platform, the majority of contributions and requests revolve around PBX functionality, thus it has become a very powerful PBX platform as well as a soft switch. Some of the new features in 1.0.1 include:

• Polycom BLF support
• Enhanced SNOM support for sidecards and BLF/SLA
• mod_Flite to allow for text to speech
• mod_pocketsphinx to allow creation of voice recognition within IVR’s
• tons and tons of bug fixes and stability improvements

What does FreeSWITCH lack today? Even the FreeSWITCH devs themselves will say the two major things missing today are documentation and examples. Every week the documentation and examples are being improved and this is making it easier and easier to get started with FreeSWITCH. Unlike Asterisk however, there is no web GUI for managing the PBX functionality at this time although rumour has it that there are a couple of development projects that are ramping up and hopefully we will see some basic systems within the next few months.

Is FreeSWITCH right for you? If you are comfortable with XML files and configuring your system by hand, FreeSWITCH sure seems to have all of the features you would need to build a production quality system. If the most experience you have with Asterisk is that you have installed trixbox and use the web gui to manage your system, then using FreeSWITCH today may be a little daunting. As more examples and improved documentation becomes available or when a good usable GUI comes out, then FreeSWITCH will start getting a lot more people trying it out.

From a developer point of view, FreeSWITCH is very contribution friendly as there is no dual licensing model or copyright waivers to sign. If you submit code and it passes their code review, it goes in and is available to everyone.

Be sure and keep an eye on FreeSWITCH, it may be the new player on the block but don’t underestimate its potential.

Website: http://freeswitch.org