I built a phone system because no one answers me
I'm installing a phone in this room, in this room, in this room, in this room. I'm installing a phone everywhere. Why I'm going old school. Actually, it's to solve a problem because no one stinking answers their phone anymore. I call my wife nothing. I call my kids nothing. I gave them phones. I gave them Apple watches.
They either don't have them or they're always on silence, so I bought a bunch of phones, all kinds of phones, too many phones. For some reason I love phones and I'm going to use them to install a phone system. Why a phone system? Well, it's fun. That's the main reason. Yeah, it's going to solve my problem from earlier, but I'm a nerd. If you've never geeked out on a phone system, get you coffee ready. Oh, and I just realized I can do this. I can call and talk to my ai.
I can talk to Terry on the phone and he talks back. All good. Thanks for asking. And then it could control my home automation and all kinds of stuff. This is what I signed up for. This is why I do this. I and also business stuff, like I should probably have a phone number for my business, which we don't have.
So we will get one of those. I'll install a phone system for my business so we can actually function as a legit business. Now I'm doing all of this with the three CX phone system. They are the sponsor of this video and I've used 'em before.
They're an awesome phone system and you can pretty much do anything. All the crazy ideas I have, they support this. And by the way, if you want to follow along, it's going to be free with their three CX SMB plan. It's free forever for up to 10 users and you don't need anything to do this.
While you could have physical phones, you don't need it. No hardware. They're going to host it for you in the cloud. We'll have this sucker set up in seconds. All you really need is some coffee,
so get it ready, let's go. The goal here is to get a phone system set up as fast as possible so my girls can talk to each other and so they'll leave me alone about it. They need to be syl. Please. Now here we're doing the cloud install. Don't blink. It's going to be fast. Okay? First, check the link in the description. This will take you to three cx.com to get signed up for a free phone system,
choose your method. I'll select Google, get logged in, put in some info, and then right here we're going to ask you about three CX users. If you want the free version, select one to 10 users. Make sure you agree with the license and click on next. It'll tell you, Hey, three CX SMB free is a plan you'll want, which is kind of crazy.
It's a full pro version of three cx. Okay, we'll click on next. It's thinking perfect time for a coffee break and your phone system is done. They just built you one right now. They even gave you a number.
Let's check it out. This URL is your phone system server and you'll log in with these credentials. We'll get logged in and we're in. Now here's the fun part. If you don't have physical phones, a soft phone is a very fun option.
Go ahead and download the three CX app. Once you have the app downloaded, you can use these scan QR code option to register your phone. Done. I've got a phone real quick for me because I'm extra. I'm going to do an on-prem install, meaning I'm going to install a three CX instance as the virtual machine on my 45 drives cluster running Prox, mox.
It's got a bit more features for nerds like me and it's great for businesses. I'll show you a bit of that later, but for now, I'm going to speed run installing this. Okay, so now let's add some user accounts for my daughters and then give them phone numbers. Go to settings, users, ad user, simple enough,
and then I'll give them soft phones. A three CX app they can install on their phone or their laptop and they can call each other, but I'm not sure they like it, so I just gave you your new phones. You like them? No, they're supposed to be on the wall. What I call Addie. I don't know her number.
It's a 5 7 5 9. Do y'all like this? No, I want a real phone on the wall, like a red phone. Is that what you want too? Yeah.
They want something they can hold old school retro. I get it. Let's do that right now. Now one thing to note here, whatever version of three CX you're using, you can absolutely use a physical phone. However, if you're using any kind of cloud instance, meaning three CX is hosting your instance for you, you'll need some way for three CX to connect to your phones inside your network and vice versa. For this, you have two options. You can either get a phone like this, which is a router phone, or you can use a Raspberry Pi and you'll install a version of three CX software called SBC, which stands for session border controller. Now, what does all that mean and why are we doing this? Well, whatever phone you add to your network, I'm assuming you'll add more than one because what's the phone of having one phone? You got to talk to each other, right? Any other phone on your network will connect to either the Raspberry Pi if you choose that option or the router phone as its connection to three CX Cloud.
Now I'm going to demo the Raspberry Pi option, and for those of you wondering, yes, we used to be able to install the entire three CX phone system on a Raspberry Pi that is no longer supported, but you can still install their recession border controller software to connect your regular phones and use that as a bridge to the three CX cloud. Now, this is actually pretty stinking easy. Officially supported is the Raspberry Pi five, and I got the sucker running on a Raspberry PI four, and that's what I'm going to show you right now. Keeping in mind, you only need to do this step. If you want to register physical phones, I'll put an article below on how to set this up.
Here's the official documentation, but I'll walk you through it real quick. It's a typical raspberry pie setup. We'll grab our microSD card, put it into a microSD card reader and plug it into our pc. New day, new shirt, new mug. Where were we? Oh yeah, putting the SD card inside our computer and launching the raspberry pie imager to write the raspberry pie os to it because we're prepping our raspberry pie. You know this. I'm just waking up Today. We'll choose our device.
This is a Raspberry Pi four. We'll choose our os. We're going to go raspberry pi os other, and then go raspberry pi os light 64 bit, and then our storage will be that little SD card I just added next. Now, here's the cool part. You can preconfigure the settings, things like username, password, and wifi, making it so easy to connect back to our reply when it's all said and done. Hey, Chuck, from the future here, while you can technically use wifi, three CX recommends not meaning disable your wifi and use ethernet only if you're going to be using this for production, for playing around probably. Okay, so I'll call mine V three cx. SBC.
Username and password are already set for me and my wifi information's already there too. Make sure SSH is enabled and save. And then yes, let's use those settings. Perfect and right. Done. I'm going to grab my sd, pop that sucker back into my raspberry pie and boot him up. Here you go, buddy.
I felt like old time Hawkeye when I said that. Well, hello. Buddy. Now there are other ways to set up a raspberry pie,
but that's a video for another time. As you're waiting for this to boot up, the best way to know what's ready is by watching your router and seeing if a new device receives an IP address and is on your network. I'm waiting on mine right now. Come on buddy. You can do it. Oh, there's mine. I'll grab the IP address and launch my terminal.
You'll do the same thing on Mac, Linux, windows, doesn't matter. It's all the same. Now we live in a wonderful world. Now I'll log into our Raspberry Pi with S-S-H-S-S-H network. Chuck, that was my username I set, and then the IP address I just grabbed.
There it is, and we're in. Now, the next step would be to set a static ip and you can do it with these commands. I'm not going to worry about it right now. Now for step five, adding our SBC in three cx, we're going to get logged back into our portal.
Now from here we'll go to admin and then voice and chat. And then right here we'll click on add SBC, and I love that Raspberry pi is one of the main options. Let's do that. Raspberry Pi continue. And then here, all we have to do is grab this command, assuming we're already logged into our Raspberry Pi, which we are, so we'll copy it, get back to our terminal, and actually I'll do one more thing. I'll do a pseudo a PT update to update our repositories, and then we'll paste in this command. Ready? Set? Yes, this should be good. Hit or enter tab over to accept, and then right here we'll need to put in our provisioning URL for three CX for me, it's right here. Whatever it is for you, input that I type it in.
I could probably copy and paste it, but I don't feel like it right now. I feel like typing. Sometimes you just feel like typing. Okay, that should be it and verify it. Yes, always double check. Okay, and then we'll put our authentication id, which is right here for me. And I think actually we'll copy and paste this one. I'm done with typing, so I'll copy paste it in my terminal. Yes, tab over to Okay, and okay,
now that actually is pretty much it. It'll do its thing. Perfect time for a coffee break. I'm rocking the Christmas mug, getting that Christmas spirit in November. It happens and now it's up and running. Well enter for, okay, that's all we have to do there.
If we get back to our three CX console and we go back, there it is, there is our SBC. So now with this raspberry pie just sitting inside of our network, our phones can use this device to register and talk to the three CX cloud. It's just magic. I love it. So now what I'm going to do real quick is walk through setting up this physical phone. Now, this is a Snam phone fun name. I'll have a list below of the phones. I've tried used to test it and loved for a full list with three CX supports.
I'll have a link below. In fact, I'll have documentation for this entire thing. Now, one thing you got to know about these phones, oftentimes they'll be POE or power over ethernet. So this cable I have right here, actually it's plugging into the wrong port. I'll be right. Back. So this phone right here is POE enabled,
meaning it can receive power from my switch. Now, not every switch can do that. If you have your doubts, you can always buy a separate power supply for your phone. I also have a link below. I bought a few of them myself. So your phone will need two things, internet, which will be in the form of an ethernet cable and power, which can be in the form of an ethernet cable running power or a separate power adapter. Now I'm going to go ahead and plug mine in and see if it boots up. See, There it goes. Power over ethernet. So powerful. Did I mention I love phones? I've always loved phones. I used to be a phone system engineer,
actually a Cisco phone system engineer that explains some of the craziness. Wait, does this phone have a camera? I think it does. We'll get to play with that. No,
adding a supportive phone is actually pretty stinking easy in three cx. If I go back to my users, I want to add a phone for me, Ron Swanson. I'll click on me, Ron Swanson and go to IP phone right over here. And you get a sad message that no IP phone is configured for the user. Let's change that right now by clicking on configure a phone. Now with a supportive phone, this is going to be crazy easy. First,
you'll choose your phone model, which mine is the Snam D 7 35. Yes, Snam D 7 35. There it is. And then we'll put in the Mac address. On the Mac addresses on the back of the phone. It'll be a 12 digit hexa decimal address. Now notice we do have the option to configure the phone myself, which also eludes to the fact that three CX might take care of that for us. Let's have them do the heavy lifting while we sip some coffee.
You might have to do the configure the phone myself if it's kind of an unsupported phone or if you have a weird situation, we don't have a weird situation, so we click on next and then it's like, Hey, you got to connect this phone via an SBC or a router phone. Look, we already have our SBC. It's a Raspberry Pi running right here. We're good to go. Click on add phone. Okay, so now we have a physical phone connecting to our raspberry Pi SBC, which connects us to the three CX Cloud, our phone system instance in the cloud. No, it's dialing stuff. Now, finally, I can give my daughter some physical phones. Let's see if they like 'em.
Here's your new phone. No, you have those ugly phones. This is not the kind of daddy, daddy. No, I'm talking about the old phones that go on the wall right here and you pick it up and you dial the number one of those old phones. You know I could talk to Dinkin Smith later. The phones aren't even plugged in yet.
Can you shush? We're trying to own. Nicole, maybe you should step up to your grandparents and your family doesn't care. Mine does. So does I. Could you step up me and no, our families are going to be in France for Christmas this year. Maybe we could do it. Do what? Plan. Plan.
What did you think? I was going to say, I don't know. We should be able to pick our own poor princess was like, oh man, I wish I could marry the guy. I love Royals in our family. Of course we are, we're British. Our great, great,
great great grandmother was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Elizabeth, the phone. Now these modern looking phones, they're fun. They have a ton of features, but my daughters had their heart set on phones like this, old phones from the shows they watch like the Brady Bunch. So the question is can we connect these old dinosaur phones to our modern phone system? Yes, but we need some magic. And here's our problem. You see these phones, these are analog phones. They communicate over a wire with analog signals and they connect to what's called the pots or the plain old telephone service.
I love that they call it that. It's the plain old, in case you didn't already know it was old. And these phones won't use in RJ 45 cable like we use for our computers and our modern phones, they'll use in RJ 11 cable, which my full unit of thinking, they're kind of like RJ 45, but they're a bit smaller. And I did not wrap this cable properly. It's a mess. This is driving me crazy. So with your plain old telephone system, you would contact a phone provider.
So at and t, you can still do this. And similar to internet, you would connect your RJ 11 cable to the phone jack on your wall, connect this back to your RJ 11 port on your phone, and not only would it receive calls over analog signals, it would also receive power through that same cable. Just enough power to make the phone work, which is fine because this isn't doing a whole lot.
It doesn't have like an LCD screen. Now our new phones, they don't use pots. They're using what's called sip or the session Initiation protocol. This technology allows our modern phones to connect over ethernet cables and use our networks with IP addresses to communicate. This is also referred to as VoIP or voiceover ip because instead of doing voiceover and analog signal, we're now doing voiceover and IP network. So here's the situation right now, this phone, the way it connects to the three CX phone system to make and receive calls is through the SIP protocol. But this old dinosaur grandpa phone doesn't have an IP address.
It can't communicate over the network and use sip. It needs a little help, but it still needs SIP to do that. So we solve that problem by giving him a little help. A bridge. This guy right here, this device bridges the old to the new. It's like a portal, a time machine.
Notice it has an RJ 45 port and an RJ 11 port. This device known as an A TA or an analog telephone adapter. I lost my pen. It will bridge the connection between our grandpa phone and the three CX phone system sitting there like a translator translating the analog signals to sip and sip to analog signals so this grandpa phone can understand what the junk we're talking about. Let's set this up right now. Now, similar to our SIP phones, this will register with our three CX system through our raspberry pie, and then whenever old grandpa phone we connect to it will just work. So I'm going to plug him in so he can power up and I'll plug him into the network with an ethernet cable. Now our task is to add this A TA to our three CX phone system. To do that,
we'll go to admin here in our three CX portal. We'll go to Voice in Chat, and we're going to click on add DE CT slash FX s. Easy for me to say. Now, this model is from grandstream. It's highly supported by a lot of things. Why I use it, and the model is HT 8 0 1. Let's see. Oh, there it is right there. I'll put it in the Mac address, just like a phone. Click on next.
It'll also connect to our phone system via the Raspberry Pi. Next, and no, we're not doing faxes, we're doing audio. G seven 11, pass through G seven 11 is an audio codec. Click on next. Actually, I don't want Ron Swanson to be the user. I'm going to close that out. I'm going to create a new user. Alright, Leslie? Nope, it is. And we'll add the device. Now to do this,
we'll also have to go into the web interface. I need to find that IP address real quick by going to my router. There it is fancy. I think it might be admin. Admin to log in by default. No, it's not. What is the default password for you, buddy? Oh, it's on the device.
I'll set a new password and we're in. We'll now need to download and save this configuration file. I'll save that to my downloads. I think I'll go to maintenance and then upgrade.
I'll go to config file and then I will upload my configuration. So click on upload that file we just downloaded. I'll add that. Okay, and I think it's asking me to restart it, I think. Yes. There it goes. So pretty painless to set this up. Now while it's booting up, I'm going to grab this RJ 11 cord cable and plug it into the RJ 11 port on the Grandstream A TA, and give it a moment to reboot.
I'm going to go back to three CX and see if it comes up. Okay, things are powered up. I'm going to lift the handset. I got a dial tone. I'm going to try calling Ron Swanson. What's his number again?
1 6 5 1 0. Anything That ringtone is cursed. Hello? Hello. How are you? How my daughters are going to love this. Yes. Smile I call it No. What about my phone? No, I want a wall phone please.
This one does this. Oh, that's That's what I didn't want. Yeah, be right back, daddy. Huh? Actually, I like this word. You don't want this one. Oh, I want that one. Okay. I call.
5 7 5 9 Or. 8 7 5 8. Really? Hello? I would like pepperonis with little babies on top and eyeballs and boogers. I want your one from babies cut up.
Feet first, then their hands you happy. You like it? So I can take your cell phone away now? Yes. Now here's where we are. We have our three CX phone system and we've got our phones configured, which is fun. They can talk to each other and that's great for internal calling, having fun. But what about the outside world?
How can I get a phone number that my grandma could use to call my kids or for my business customers could call and talk to my employees for that? We're going back to sip the session initiation protocol. Specifically, we're going to need something called a sip trunk, which sounds weird. I know this sip trunk is like a tunnel to the outside world, A tunnel to a telephone number provider or essentially a phone company.
Well actually create an account with this company. And because this is a phone service, you do have to pay for that phone number. It's not crazy, but they will, yes, give you a phone number. And when people call this number, the phone company will send that call over the tunnel, your sip trunk to your three CX system, and vice versa.
When we make a call to an outside phone number, it'll travel over our sip trunk, go to our phone company and they'll help us make the call outbound using this phone number as our caller id. Now thankfully, the setup on this is not crazy at all. It's actually pretty easy. And as far as the phone company, you've got a few options for me.
I love the company VoIP ms, you don't have to go with them. There are other options, but I'm going to demo this. And by the way, it's not sponsored at all by VoIP ms. I just like them a lot. So we'll head on over to VoIP ms, click on sign up now create an account.
You can do residential or business. I'll do business for myself. Click continue and then continue on with the account creation. They should send you an activation email. And once your account is active, click login. Alright, once you're logged in, the first thing you'll notice is that, hey, your current balance is at zero. We'll need a little bit of money there in order to buy a phone number and then use that phone number. So go ahead and click on add funds right there.
I'll add 15 bucks and I'll use PayPal. Actually I'll do automatic billing. Okay, now have some funds added up here in the menu. We'll go to DID numbers and then order Ds. DID stands for direct and word dial. Essentially it's just a phone number. Now for me,
I'm going to do a local number, United States and then search for one in my state and I'll find a number real quick. I want to find one that just kind of speaks to me. Oh, I like this one. For the plan, I can do per minute or flat rate. I'll just do per minute. And then we'll choose our pop server, which pop means point of presence. Essentially it's going to be the SIP server that you're connecting to and you want it to be closest to you. Now for me, I'm in Dallas, so I'll choose Dallas one and then I'll scroll down. I don't have to worry about any other settings I don't believe.
And then I'll click on order. DID. Oh, my phones are not added yet. Come on. I love that number. Alright, I got to wait for funds to be added. How long did it say it might take? It says real time. It's taking forever. Okay, funds have been added. Alright, time to have some funds.
There's something there. I don't know. Lemme try ordering my DID once more. It's only going to cost me a dollar 25 initially. Confirm order. Here we go. And then a monthly fee obviously and we got it. If I go to DID numbers manage ds, I should see it right there. So now all we have to do is set up the routing. Let's go ahead and click on that.
Click on the main account settings and then click on inbound settings. And then we'll change our device. Type from a TA IP phone softphone to I-P-P-B-X and apply. And then right here we'll see a little option that says for connection information, click here. Okay, let's do that. Here's going to give us our account details. We're just going to leave that there.
Now we're going to go back to three CX and we'll go to admin once more, go to voice and chat. And this time we're adding a trunk, a sip trunk. So we'll click on that first option right here. We'll name it. And notice right now we have a default route of where a call will go when it arrives on this trunk. So for example, when someone calls that DID, we just ordered through VoIP ms, where's it going to go when it arrives at our system right now, it's going to go to me by default. Actually, I want to change that to daddy. I mean that's what I'm putting for my kids. My employees don't call me that,
at least not to my face. And then also notice it'll create an outbound rule for the SIP trunk by default, meaning it gives us a way to dial outside of our phone system correction. It actually won't be created by default, but it will take you to a new menu after you click save to help you create that rule. You'll see that here in a second. Choose our provider country, us.
That's where live provider we're going to choose. Let's go find it VoIP ms right there. Put our main trunk number, the one I just ordered, and then our SIP, username and password and we'll get this from VoIP ms and then also specifically for VoIP ms, they do have a guide for a few things you can do to make sure everything works great. Now, because every carrier might just be a little bit different. I mean it will be different. I'm not going to go through everything here.
Just know, go through the guide, make sure it all matches. The password will be the password that you set when you signed up in the portal for VoIP ms. And then finally our server, which we set when we registered our DID going to Dallas, one VoIP ms. That's what we set. And then I think that's all we need.
I'm going to click on save. And then it auto configured an outbound rule for us. Now this is important. Now when you dial an internal phone system, if you've never had a corporate phone system, normally you have what's called extensions. So for example, I have mine as 5, 7, 5, 5. My daughter's as 5 7, 5 A, so on. So I know that that's going to be my four digit extension range.
Now when I want to dial out, I need some sort of number that signifies to my phone system, Hey, I'm about to dial an external number. Don't look anywhere here in our internal system. Little correction. I know you're seeing a lot of future chuck in here to fix some stuff. It happens. But here I'm adding a prefix for an outbound rule.
That's a very common thing for a lot of phone systems, but you actually don't need to do that here. For example, in the US you could just dial the number like you normally would. It'd be a 10 digit number and it would just work. But for me though, I prefer the prefix because that's just how I did things in the past.
I'm an old phone system guy. When I was a phone system engineer, I always made that a nine. So nine would be the digit you start to dial and then whatever follows that will be the external number. So I'll say the prefix will be nine. And then whenever the sip trunk sends the number out to VoIP ms, it actually needs to take that nine away. So we'll strip the first digit. That's all we need. We'll click on save and that should be it.
Now if you go back to our homepage, go to main menu and home here in VoIP ms. We can scroll down just a little bit until we see main account registration status. If you see registration status registered, you're good to go. Now let's test this out. Let's see if I get a call on my cell phone. Ah,
it's coming in. Hello. Hello. It's working. It's working. Hi. Hi. Not sure what happened there. Alright, now I want to call back in. Now it should go to the phone behind me on the floor.
That's what I told it to do. Let's call it back. Yes. It worked seamlessly. I love it so much. Now there is one thing I want to do differently though.
I don't want that number going to just one phone. I don't want my phone to ring every time someone calls my house because it could be a call for my oldest daughter, my second daughter, my third daughter, my wife. It could be anybody. So what I want to do, because this is a phone system and we're extra, what I want to do is set up an IVR or a menu so when someone calls that number, they'll be met with a nice voice saying, Hey, thank you for calling the Keith House. To reach Chloe, press one. To reach Chuck, press two. This is actually remarkably easy to do. Let's do it right now we're already here in the admin settings of three cx.
From here we're going to go to call handling how our calls are being handled and at the top in our menu we'll see the option to add a digital receptionist. Remember the episode in the office where Pam is the receptionist, but they had that sales guy coming in to sell a phone system that would replace her and Pam kept blowing him off. Jim scared him away by acting like Michael, but this is what would've replaced Pam. It's so funny. Let's add that right now. Virtual extension number. Yeah, let's say 8,000. That's good.
We'll assign a DID to it, which is the only DIDI have set up right now for our system. Hey, it's me again. Also, you actually don't need a DID assigned to this number for it to work the default route on the trunk. We'll route it to Pam. Call my digital receptionist name. Pam type is standard. Oh, they have wake up. Okay, we'll deal with that here in a moment. We'll do standard type right now,
department default, and then the prompt. So now here we'll have to record our own prompt. This shouldn't be too hard. We can do that right now. Hello and thank you for calling the Keith home.
To reach Chuck, press one. To reach Chloe, press two. To reach Addie, press three. To repeat these options, press four. Done. Okay, then we have our action for zero. We'll say do nothing for one. We'll connect to an extension. We'll have that go to me for two,
we'll have it go to Chloe and for three we'll have that go to Addie. Notice our options though. We can connect to our ring group, another digital receptionist, a call queue, just go to voicemail. You got options and it's so cool that we can do this and that. This is free, it's stupid. By the way, you can do this without having a DID. You could simply just have this virtual number that you could call.
So for example, I could just call 8,000 on my internal phone and would reach this digital receptionist. In fact, we'll try that right now. So I'm going to save this for now. Now what I'm going to do is make sure my SIP trunk will actually send calls to that. I'm going to go to my home number trunk and the default route I'm going to have it go to Pam. So just to clear this up,
I'm adding a default route for it to go to Pam and it would do that if no other rules were defined for this. However, I already assigned the DID to that call handler. So it's going to do that rule and then use this rule as a last resort. So it's pretty much redundant. I've done the same thing twice, just FYI. It's still going to work. It's just redundant. I'm going to try it out.
Hello and thank you for calling the Keith home. To reach Chuck, press one. To reach Chloe, press two. Let's reach Chloe. To reach Addie, press three. Hello. Hello.
That is so fun. Okay, this is arguably the coolest thing you can do with this phone system and that's call AI and not just any ai, your local ai. In previous videos I've posted, I set up home assistant, my home automation platform. I then added their assist platform, which enables a voice assistant running on my AI server, Terry.
So now I have Alexa type devices running my own local AI voice assistant, even with a custom voice. But thanks to the wonderful people over at home assistant, you can actually use a VoIP system. With this, I can pick up the phone and call my AI and control my house, ask it questions.
This is the best thing in the whole world to be able to use an analog phone, such old technology to be able to call ai. I love that combination. It's so fun to me. But anyways, here's how we do this and it's a little tricky depending on your setup. Now for me, because my three CX system is set up on-prem, meaning it's in my network, I can simply set up a sip trunk that will route calls over to home assistant to call my ai. And that's only if you have your system on-prem, the cloud people,
I still got you. You won't be able to do a sip trunk. However, if you have an analog phone set up with the grandstream a TA, like I just showed you, you can use this A TA to directly dial home assistant and talk to your ai. Let me show you, this is amazing disclaimer if you're going to do this, this is not officially supported or recommended by three CX when we're using that grandstream A TA to make a sit trunk connection to our home assistant setup. That's bypassing three CX and if not properly secured, it could open you up to hacks. So case in point, if you're doing this for a business, you probably don't want to do this setup and if you're doing it for your house, you're probably okay. Just make sure everything's private and secure first. The journey starts in home assistant. If you go to settings,
devices and services and they click on add integration search for one called VoIP. There it is. We'll submit that and add it done. If we jump in there, there should be nothing here right now, no entities, no devices. Now we need to find out what our home assistant IP address is. You may already know that. If you don't, let's go to settings, system network and then drop down IPD four. You should see your IP address right there. Remember that IP address.
Now here's all we have to do here. I'm going to log into my A TA. The account should be on three cx. Yeah, here it is. The web console password. I'll copy it from here, from the Grandstream phone configuration. From here we're going to change two things. First we'll jump into the port status.
Now your Grandstream configuration may look a bit different. It actually might look more similar to this interface here, but we'll be modifying the same type of settings, the same kind of settings and actually not port status, although it is on hook and ready to go. Cool. We'll be going to port settings down here, dropping that down and going to FXS port. And then here in this menu,
we're going to go to call settings at the top. The first thing we're going to change is the off hook auto dial. What this is is when you lift the handset off the hook, it will auto dial whatever number you're going to put here. Now we're not going to put a number here, it's kind of weird. We're going to put an IP address. Watch this first,
we'll start with an asterisk and then we'll put it in four seven. I don't know why it's four seven. That's just what Home Assistant had put in place. And then we'll start putting in our IP address. Mine was 10.
And then instead of dots we're going to put asterisk. So it would be 10 point 70.7193. Now it's going to be 10 asterisk, 70 asterisk. Can't talk seven asterisk 1, 9, 3. So whatever your IP address is,
put it right after the four seven just like this. And then we'll add one more asterisk at the end of our IP address and specify 5 0 6 0 or 50 60 the default sip port. So now when you lift that handset off the hook, it should dial that IP address.
And because your Grandstream a TA device is on the same network as your home assistant, it should be able to reach it just fine. Now real quick, this right here, this config is not going to work. There's one thing we have to change and that's the dial plan. We're going to remove this and we're going to paste in this. Keeping in mind, I will have all the configuration below.
That'll be in a big blog post so you can follow along with this dial plan in place and this off hook auto dial in place, it should work. Now you're probably thinking, Chuck, what if I want to use this phone to be able to call people And the AI right now it's just going to dial AI every single time. I hear you right here. If you want that option, we have an off hook auto dial delay to where it'll wait a moment before auto dialing the ai. So we'll give it like two seconds so that way you have a chance to dial another number before auto dials ai. So that's it. We're going to scroll down, click on save and apply. One more thing with a TA. We're going to go over to audio settings and scroll down a little bit until we see vo coder settings. For choice one, we'll want to change it to Opus.
Opus is what Home Assistant is expecting for a codec. Once you have that selected, just click on save and apply. Now that should be it, but I do need to change the codex that we can use similar to the A TA. I'll need to use the Opus codec.
So I'm going to go to Advanced and then Codex, make sure Opus is priority one and safe. Now what I want to do first is try calling this phone here to make sure everything's still working right. So off hook. Perfect, that works. Now I'm going to let it go for two seconds. This is. Your smart home speaking. Your phone is connected, but you must configure it within Home Assistant.
Okay, so it reached home assistant. That was home assistant talking. Now what we're going to go back to home assistant, go into settings, go to devices and services and get back into the VoIP or voiceover IP section. Notice we have one device and five entities. Now what? Let's jump into that device. Click on one device.
It's now viewing your Grand Stream, a TA as a device, a Ying satellite. That's what they call it. And then down here we're going to configure this to use a certain voice assistant that we have set up in the assist platform. I'm going to enable this and have it use Terry. So now let's test it out.
Hey, how are you? Hi. Doing, doing all right. Just keep in the studio. Humming on. I'll buy him. Anything else? Can you tell me what year the Matrix came out? The Matrix was released in 199. Thank you so much. Can you tell me what actor played the main character?
Neil, the main guy was played right there on res. How amazing is that? You can call AI with your phone system. I have so many ideas.
So here we are right now with your analog phone and your A TA, you can call your AI and you can also interface with the three CX phone system. It's beautiful. Now, real quick, because I have an on-prem three CX system, I'm going to show you how I set up my trunk. So here in three cx I'm going to go to voice and chat and click on add a trunk and I'll name this home assistant. Now again, if you are using the free version in the cloud, you will not be able to do this. I'm going to change my provider to generic sub trunk and this is the option you will not have. And then it's asking for authentication.
I'm just going to put in nothing because it doesn't need to authorize. I know it's me. Again, just so you know, the reason this trunk doesn't require authentication is because it's an IP based trunk and the system on the other end is programmed just to receive any request.
It gets no authentication required. And then under registrar server, I'll add in the IP address of my home assistant server. That should be all I need. I'll allow it to create an outbound rule. Click on save. And here it's doing the outbound rule. I'll say the prefix will be star eight nine.
We'll strip the first three digits and that should be it. Save. Now let's try it out. All right. I am not getting audio. Okay, I updated the firmware and that didn't work, but I did get it working and I was just being dumb. Here's what I missed on the trunk itself. If I go into options,
they have Kodak priority, I had to go in here and click on add and add the opus codec, which I now have as priority. So now when I call this now, Hey, how you doing? I'm good. Thanks for asking. How can I assist you today at Network Chuck Studios? Can you tell me the origin of Christmas trees and don't make it too long? Tell me like in 10 seconds. Y 16th century Christian tradition is credited with popular island. The modern Christmas tree, evergreen bird trees were seen as a symbol of life along in winter. Evergreen bird was also associated with Jesus Christ, the tree of life.
How cool is that? Now, there is one problem specifically with the sip trunk option. I'm doing here in three cx. I'm talking to the guy at home assistant about this. I got to share some logs with him. When I call back, I get nothing. So I have to actually go in here and restart the integration, reload it, And it works now. But I have to do that every time. So what I did as just kind of a bandaid was create an automation that'll detect when my phone calls go idle, it'll reload it automatically so I don't have to worry about it.
I'm not going to detail that here, but I will have it in my blog post if you want to check that out. If you are running a local version of three CX and you're making a sip trunk connection, okay, here's the state of things. I've had my phone system set up in my house in my business for about two weeks and it's amazing. Before I could not get ahold of my kids. Now I can do it.
Actually right now, let's see, I've got one number. I call this one right here. My house, 8,001. It rings all the users, all the phones in my house to get ahold of people. Let's try it out. Ringing every phone right now. Hello? Hey, who is this? I dunno.
Hey Rosie. Hi daddy. How you doing? Hello, daddy. Hi Daddy. Hi. I love being able to call my kids right from my office. And then little,
that's my second. My second youngest, is that how you say it? She doesn't have a phone, but now she kind of does. Also, my team is kind of bad at communication. My manager's always trying to get ahold of the editors and they're never available, so she just calls 'em up now. That's pretty cool.
And with this phone system, you can get as nerdy as you want to get. It's so crazy. For example, they had this three CX call flow designer, which reminds me of something I used to use back in the day. As a phone system engineer, you can do so much. So right now, this script here,
I have it configured to be a menu that will send a web hook to home assistant to simply turn off the light behind me, straight out. Actually, I forgot the number. Oh, it's 8,009. Watch the light. I just pressing one.
Turns it off, I'll call it back. Turns back on. So imagine having an IVR, like my wife is always forgetting the commands to tell Terry, our voice assistant to turn lights on and off in our house. She gets so frustrated no matter how many times I tell her. So having a number, she can call and go through a menu, press one to turn on the bedroom lights, press two to turn the TV off. Just those things. That's so cool. I love the old and the new, and being able to talk to my voice assistant is just sick.
Hey Terry, how you doing today? Thanks. I'm doing great. Thanks. Can I help you with anything else? Would you like to patrol any of the device in your home? Actually, can you just tell me the temperature of the server room Right now? I need to run the Hasket State tool to get the current state of the server room's temperature. Let me try that. In the server room there's currently 73.2 degrees f. Mike. That's so cool. I can call and talk to a voice assistant and ask it what the temperature of my server room is. I can do anything I want. I feel all powerful. That's the video.
I'll catch you guys next time.
2024-12-10 12:25
