How to make phone calls from command line?

This article presents a command line SIP endpoint available as part of my rtclite [1] project. It is useful in a number of scenarios such as:

• dialing out a phone number from command line, 
• performing automated VoIP system tests, 
• showing quick demos of communication systems, or 
• experimenting with media processing on the voice path, e.g., for speech recognition, recording or text-to-speech. 

These tasks cannot easily be done using existing user interface based web, installed or mobile apps. I had implemented something like this, named sipua [2], about 15 years ago in C/C++ at Columbia University. There are other projects such as sipp [3], pjsua [4] or sipcmd [5] that implement some version of command line SIP user agent, but may have limitations such as lack of support for audio capture device, or hard to extend to add new media processing capability such as text-to-speech. This article describes a SIP endpoint written in Python [6] as part of my open source project.

Click here to see the full description of this SIP endpoint written in Python [6].

The project page shows how to use the SIP endpoint to send/receive instant messages and voice call. The command line options allow you to configure various attributes such as whether to register with a SIP server, how to respond to incoming requests, how to work around SIP entities that incorrectly handle CRLF for line endings, how to test signaling without media path, and so on. The project page also describes how to use the module in your own Python project.

Following video demo of the SIP endpoint shows interoperability with X-lite terminal and dialing out toll free numbers using a VoIP provider. It shows how to dial a phone number using a VoIP provider, how to send DTMF digits from terminal, and some experimental features such as text-to-speech and speech recognition. Do not forget to watch in full screen!

References

1. Rtclite: light weight implementations of real-time communication protocols and applications in Python, http://www.rtclite.com, https://github.com/theintencity/rtclite
2. Sipua: a SIP test user agent for Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and Windows NT, http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/irt/cinema/doc/sipua.html
3. SIPp: free open source test tool/traffic generator for SIP, http://sipp.sourceforge.net/ 
4. Pjsua: open source command line SIP user agent (softphone), http://www.pjsip.org/pjsua.htm 
5. sipcmd: the command line SIP/H.323/RTP softphone, https://github.com/tmakkonen/sipcmd
6. caller: SIP application to initiate or receive VoIP calls from command line. https://github.com/theintencity/rtclite/blob/master/rtclite/app/sip/caller.md