Making Google Talk Work With Asterisk

Products based on proprietary technologies sometimes suck! That’s because you don’t have any choice but to subscribe to the service as the provider defines it. Most of the time, you cannot interface these with your own services or produts. In telephony, for instance, most proprietary systems cannot be easily interfaced with others. Skype, for example, cannot easily be interfaced with Asterisk without complicated set-ups (i.e., actually running Skype on one machine, or going through analog connections).

Some services that are based on open-source technologies (whether in full or loosely) will be easier to use, on the other hand. For example, Google Talk used to be a closed network, but then it opened itself to other Jabber networks (Google Talk is Jabber-based) so you can chat with other Jabber clients.

Since version 1.4, Asterisk has had support for Jingle, which is a protocol needed to “talk” with Google Talk. VoIP Info has a guide to setting up Asterisk for Google Talk here. This requires ikesmel, which can be downloaded here.

jabber.conf

This is where you set your gmail/gtalk account info and will register you with the google server.

[general]
debug=yes
autoprune=no
autoregister=no

[gtalk_account]
type=client
serverhost=talk.google.com
username=username@gmail.com/Talk
secret=*****
port=5222
usetls=yes
usesasl=yes
buddy=buddyusername@gmail.com
statusmessage=”This is an Asterisk server”
timeout=100

gtalk.conf

This is where the settings for the actual calls are made:

[general]
context=google-in
allowguest=yes

;
[guest]
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
context=google-in

[buddy]
username=buddyusername@gmail.com

disallow=all
allow=ulaw
context=google-in
connection=gtalk_account

extensions.conf

…
[google-in]
exten => s,1,NoOp( Call from Gtalk )
exten => s,n,Set(CALLERID(name)=”From Google Talk”)
exten => s,n,Dial(SIP/my_sip_phones)
…

[google-out]
exten => 200,1,Dial(gtalk/gtalk_account/buddyusername@gmail.com)

It is suggested that you create a new Gmail/Google account that Asterisk will use.