Digium has released the latest version of its free and open source VoIP software Asterisk. Asterisk’s features includes call waiting, hold and transfer, and caller ID, and this release adds support for Google Voice and Google Talk, as well as numerous other features.
Asterisk boasts over 2 million users and supports a variety of telephony protocols, both analog and VoIP, and both U.S. and European standard signals.
Some of the new features in Asterisk 1.8 include:
- Google Talk and Google Voice support
- Calendar integration, for Microsoft Exchange and iCal
- High-resolution timestamps for call data records
- A new call logging system
- Distributed Device State using Jabber/XMPP PubSub
- IPv6 Support in the SIP channel driver
This update has been designated as a Long Term Support release, so there will be four years of vendor support. In addition to that is the strong community working on Asterisk. Since Asterisk 1.6.2, for example, the project has had contributions from over 500 reporters, 300 testers and 200 developers.
The release is licensed under the GNU GPL and is available for download here.
