Disposable Phone Numbers

Disposable Phone Numbers™ (DPN) is a software package that uses VoiceXML, CCXML, grXML, Java, and database software to create disposable telephone numbers.

Why Disposable Phone Numbers? In a word, privacy. Once you give out your telephone number, anyone can use it to call you. With Disposable Phone Numbers, you can give out unique telephone numbers to every business and person that requests one. If they violate your privacy, you can either disable that phone number or you can re-direct that call in other ways — e.g., to voicemail, or even to a "fake" voicemail system that doesn't actually save the message.

A brief article that explains the motivation and the workings of this project is here.

Disposable Phone Numbers (DPN) offers the following features:

• The ability to give out any number of telephone numbers.
• Web-based control of creating, activating, and monitoring telephone numbers.
• Web-based monitoring of phone number activity — who is caling, when they call, and other data.
• DPN runs on standard VoiceXML, CCXML, and web servers. It was tested on a freely-available developer server from Voxeo.

The technology is explained in some detail in the Documentation.

The current release is pre-alpha. While any CCXML software programmer can modifty a single line of code to forward calls to a real telephone, this version is a test of the concept and the user interface, so all calls are dropped. This package does not actually perform database lookups, again because it's a test of the user interface and the concept.

Even in its current state, the package provides a good way to learn about CCXML and VoiceXML, and for that matter how to use Java servlets.

CCXML, VoiceXML, SSML, and other standard speech and telephony technologies form the core of this package. The package was tested on Voxeo's freely-licensed Prophecy server, which provides a complete SIP/CCXML/VoiceXML/TTS/web server solution. Nothing in the packages are Voxeo-centric, and it can be used on any system that provides similar capabilities (PHP is required, as well as support for Java servlets as provided by Jetty and Tomcat).

The Disposable Phone Number project releases its files via Sourceforge.