Voice is the most universal and inclusive means of communication, and it's an ideal way to expand the reach and impact of health and humanitarian technologies. Verboice is a free and open-source tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and run projects that interact via voice, allowing your users to listen and record messages in their own language and dialect or answer questions with a phone keypad. Verboice projects can start small and scale up, making it possible to improve lives even in communities previously closed off by literacy and technological barriers.

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Installing your own server

We use dockerdev to get domain names for the components of the app - so it can interoperate with other apps from the InSTEDD platform. Although it's optional, your first step to have Verboice running on Docker should be to install dockerdev - it needs to be running before creating any Verboice container, network and other objects.

Run the following commands to have a stable development environment.

$ docker compose run --rm --no-deps web bundle install
$ docker compose run --rm web bash
root@web_1 $ rake db:setup db:seed
$ docker compose up

You can also run the frontend unit tests inside the docker container. Here's how:

$ docker compose run --rm web rake db:test:prepare
$ docker compose run --rm web rspec

Compounding Docker and Rails load times makes for a terrible out of the box testing experience. To mitigate that, we use Zeus (https://github.com/burke/zeus). Zeus pre-loads your Rails application so you only pay the initialization cost once.

The Dockerfile.dev creates an image with Zeus already installed on it. To run tests with Zeus, first you need to:

1. From the app root, run: zeus init. This is a one time process that will create a couple of files custom_plan.rb and zeus.json.
2. To start Zeus, from the app root, run: zeus start.
3. From another terminal, run zeus test spec to run tests.

Verboice is deployed with Capistrano. After bundle installing, run:

$ cap -s branch=feature/my_branch deploy HOSTS=verboice-stg.instedd.org RVM=1

This will deploy feature/my_branch code to the host at verboice-stg.instedd.org using RVM. Your mileage may vary.

Verboice supports Intercom as its CRM platform. To load the Intercom chat widget, simply start Verboice with the env variable INTERCOM_APP_ID set to your Intercom app id (https://www.intercom.com/help/faqs-and-troubleshooting/getting-set-up/where-can-i-find-my-workspace-id-app-id).

Verboice will forward any conversation with a logged user identifying them through their email address. Anonymous, unlogged users will also be able to communicate.

If you don't want to use Intercom, you can simply omit INTERCOM_APP_ID or set it to ''.

To test the feature in development, add the INTERCOM_APP_ID variable and its value to the environment object inside the web service in docker-compose.yml.

Verboice leverages the alto_guisso gem to connect with GUISSO.

To set it up, you just have to register Verboice as a new Application in your GUISSO instance, and copy the guisso.yml file to your local config/guisso.yml.