Lately I’ve been involved in some work projects related to Asterisk.
I had the opportunity to play with the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) to see what can be done with it.
In a few words, it allows you to execute scripts on an action (eg: a user calling an extension), that will interact with other systems (eg: retrieve information from a database and store other input data) and trigger other actions.
First of all, given that I’m more familiar with PHP than Perl, I looked around for libraries that can interact with my loved PHP.
You can get a lot of useful information at http://voip-info.org, being more specific at: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+AGI
This will help you understand what can and cannot be done…