Asterisk at the Heart of Interactive Media (AstriCon 2014)

ASTERISK AT THE HEART OF
INTERACTIVE MEDIA
A behind-the-scenes look at interactive web series “Emilie”

About me
• VP & CTO at Ubity, a cloud-based business unified
communications service provider and platform
• Have been using Asterisk since 2007
• Involved in several interactive media and art projects that
use telecommunications (telephony, text messaging, etc.)
to engage and interact with the audience
ASTERISK AT THE HEART OF INTERACTIVE MEDIA

About “Emilie”
• A three-part transmedia (multi-platform) romantic comedy
“experience” launched in February 2013
• Has won several awards and nominations:
Ø SXSW Interactive Awards 2014 “Finalist” (Film & TV)
Ø Webby Awards 2014 “Finalist” (Best Use Of Interactive Video, Experimental
And Weird)
Ø Geneva International Film Festival 2013 “Grand Prize” (Best TV Series, Web &
Transmedia)
Ø Gémeaux 2013 “Grand Prize” (Best Original Interactive Show)
Ø NUMIX 2013 “Grand Prize” (Best Interactive Production)
Ø Toronto DigiAwards 2013 “Finalist” (Best In Cross-Platform)
Ø Prix Italia 2013 “Finalist” (Best New Content For The Multi-Screen Television)
Ø Banff World Media Festival 2013 “Finalist” (Best Cross-Platform Project)
Ø Boomerang Awards 2013 “Grand Prize” (Best Website or Application)

Transmedia experience?
• Telling a story, or creating an experience across multiple
platforms or formats
• The end goal being…
• Have the audience care more about the story and its characters
• Get and keep their attention!
• Hook them back in after they’re done watching the first episode

Part 1 – “Taxi Apollon”
• Launched on Valentine’s day 2013
• Justin Apollon, a cab driver turned cupid, offers to “spread
the love” by calling your lover, friend or coworker and
deliver a heartfelt (and hilarious) message on your behalf

Part 1 – Interactivity elements
• Voice detection to detect if a human had answered, and
make it sound like a conversation
• Video sequences synchronized with telephony events
(ringing, voicemail, answer)
• Customized greeting based on how the user is related to
the person we are calling

Part 1 – Transmedia elements
• The web experience allowed us to gather
information that would later be used to hook
the user back into the story
• The use of telephony took the experience out
in the “real world” and allowed it to spread
widely
• A facebook app also helped to spread the word
• Video testimonials of “satisfied customers”
gave hints on what was to come

Part 2 – Interactive web series
• Four-episode interactive web series that follows the men in
Emilie’s life (ex-boyfriends, childhood best friend, fiancé)
just before her wedding and big move abroad

Part 2 – The main goals
① Avoid being cheesy and predictable at all cost – ask the
user as little information as possible!
② Avoid using the phone merely just as a remote control
(e.g. “hit 4 to go left, 6 to go right”)
③ Make sure the experience can be enjoyed by as many
people, and on as many devices (smart and dumb) as
possible

Part 2 – How to avoid “cheesiness”
• Our team was involved very early in the process – early
enough that the script and dialogues could still be altered
to adjust to the limitations of telecommunications
• Focus on the more plausible, “real world” interactions that
humans have between each other (call, text, e-mail) and
with their phones (voicemail, videos)
• Ask for as little information as possible, so the audience
doesn’t expect the interactivity elements

We didn’t want to ask users for their
phone number…
Instead, we have the users
initiate the first contact by
calling us so we can gather
their phone number (CallerID)
and associate it with their
web session.
It does not work with
blocked CallerID, and it
can get tricky in settings
where several users
share a CallerID (office).

Part 2 – Making it widely available
Geography
• Different sets of phone numbers (to call and text characters on the
screen) were made available for users in Canada, the U.S., the UK,
France and Switzerland
• We didn’t want the users to have to pay long distance fees to call
the characters – it got tricky in Canada!
Technology
• Support for “dumb phones” (e.g. landline)
• The most important interactivity points rely on voice or DTMF
• Responses to text messages received from characters not necessary
• Fallback to an in-video “smartphone analog” in certain situations
• Should we use speech recognition, or speech detection?

We didn’t want to ask users for their
location… but had to anyway.
GeoIP lookups are useful to
determine a user’s country of
origin, but not so much for
the city – something that was
especially important for our
Canadian users!
20 different sets of local
phone numbers were
needed in Canada in order
to cover most regions.

How can we interact with the user?
Voice
Have the user call, or be
called, and “talk” in real-time
with a character on
the screen

Demonstration (dangerous demo?)

Digits (DTMF)
Have the digits pressed
by a user in an automated
voice menu (e.g.
voicemail) trigger video
sequences, or actions on
screen in real-time

Demonstration

Text message (SMS)
Have the user text
back and forth in real-time
with a character
on screen

Mobile as a second screen
Have the user watch a livestream (on smartphone) of
something that is filmed by a character on the screen

E-mail
Have a character on
screen send the user
an e-mail in real-time

Technical components
• Flash (video) / ActionScript
• Javascript / Node.js
• Flask (Python) REST API with AMI library
• Asterisk

Technical issues or concerns
Pairing a caller with a web session
• Using temporarily assigned phone numbers taken from a pool
Perfect timing
• Making sure that the audio track from the video is in sync with
the audio of the call with the user
Talking to the user
• Using speech detection vs. recognition
Limitations with mobile carriers/devices
• Certain mobile carriers or devices can’t display CallerID name

Relevance of “traditional” telephony in
today’s interactive media
• Still very relevant, as two-thirds of the world’s mobiles are
dumb phones (aka “feature phones”)
• Medium of choice to reach the largest amount of people
worldwide, especially in emerging countries that have
better access to mobile phones than computers
connected to the Internet
• 3G/4G mobile Internet is spreading, but voice, DTMF and
SMS still remain the common denominators

Part 3 – Movie
Released during the
summer of 2013 (sadly not
interactive… ;-)

Any questions?

Thank you!
• Taxi Apollon (french)
http://www.taxi-apollon.com/
• Emilie (french, but with english subtitles)
http://emilie.radio-canada.ca/
scouture@ubity.com
@sysreq
linkedin.com/in/sebastiencouture

Asterisk at the Heart of Interactive Media (AstriCon 2014)

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