Adhearsion is...
Adhearsion is a new way to write voice-enabled applications. It's not just an API or library — it's a fully-featured framework, the first of its kind, designed for maximal code reuse and intuitiveness. The name "Adhearsion" is a combination of "adhesion" and "hear" because Adhearsion shines best when integrating technologies with voice.
It's modern
Adhearsion uses the high-level Ruby programming language and has a comprehensive regression test suite. In the age of the social web, what other technologies are more social than voice? Adhearsion aims to help merge this so-called "Web 2.0" world with the previously untamable telephony world.
It's intuitive
Voice applications don't have to be hard. Adhearsion abstracts much of the complicated telephony domain, allowing you to focus on what's really important: the business domain. Take a look at the Examples to see what we mean.
It's open-source
We take open-source software seriously. The telecom industry, above all, needs fresh innovative talent and Adhearsion's here to foster it. This is one of the final major frontiers for open-source to truly make a transformative impact and now is an exciting time to be a part of it.
We think it's fun
Many hackers' faces light up the first time they run code which makes the cell phone in their pocket ring. Whether you're a veteran telephony engineer or a web developer wanting a new experiment to do over the weekend, we think Adhearsion is enough of a departure from classical telephony to tickle your fancy.
Download Adhearsion
Latest Adhearsion Release
If you're not familiar with Ruby, virtually all Ruby software is distributed through the use of RubyGems, the official Ruby package management system. If you don't have RubyGems installed, see the section below entitled "Getting Ruby, RubyGems and Adhearsion".
With RubyGems installed, simply type the following command to install Adhearsion:
sudo gem install adhearsion
And that's it! You now have the "ahn" command and can create and execute Adhearsion applications. Go read one of the Getting Started guides in the left toolbar for help writing your first application.
Note: Windows users shouldn't prefix the gem command with sudo.
Edge Adhearsion
The latest and greatest of Adhearsion, called "Edge Adhearsion," can be found on the Adhearsion Github project. There are two ways to download Edge Adhearsion from Github: using the git Source Code Management (SCM) tool or an auto-generated tarball snapshot.
To download the code with git, type...
git clone git://github.com/jicksta/adhearsion.git
Or download the latest tarball of Edge Adhearsion from Github without git.
The code on the Github master branch is usually always stable and usable. Most of the development of Adhearsion actually happens on separate branches (git makes branching extremely easy) and Jay merges the changes into master when they're ready. This keeps the master branch relatively stable but not entirely up-to-date feature-wise. If you wish to browse activity on other branches, check out Github's Network Viewer.
Choose one of the operating systems below for installation instructions.
Mac OS X Leopard
Since you use Leopard, you already have Ruby and RubyGems installed! All you have to do is install Adhearsion using the gem command:
sudo gem install adhearsion
This will automatically add the ahn command to your system, allowing you to create and start applications in the following step.
Yep, that's it!
Mac OS X Tiger
We recommend installing Ruby and RubyGems together using MacPorts. MacPorts is a package manager for Mac OS X similar to the package managers that come with virtually every Linux distribution. Download MacPorts from HERE and follow the install instructions on the website.
MacPorts installs the port command. Use this to install Ruby and RubyGems by doing...
sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems
Now, just install Adhearsion by doing
sudo gem install adhearsion
This will automatically add the ahn command to your system, allowing you to create and start applications in the following step.
Linux/BSD
On Linux it's best to use your distro's package manager to install Ruby and RubyGems, then have RubyGems update itself.
On Debian and Ubuntu you may install Ruby and RubyGems by doing
sudo apt-get install -y ruby1.8-dev rubygems1.8 \
irb1.8 libsqlite3-ruby1.8
On the Red Hat variants such as RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS, run the following command:
sudo yum install -y ruby ruby-rdoc ruby-irb \
ruby-sqlite3
Updating RubyGems
Before we install any gems with RubyGems, let's make sure we're using the latest version. Upgrade RubyGems by running the following command.
sudo gem update --system
Now, we'll use the gem command to install Adhearsion:
sudo gem install adhearsion
This will automatically add the ahn command to your system, allowing you to create and start applications in the following step.
Microsoft Windows
Note: Currently Ahearsion does not support Windows, although we are working to have this support. In the meantime please refer to the FAQ for updates and how to use Adhearsion in the meantime.
