Zasterisk is the old text-adventure game Zork, implemented as a voice-based game that you play over the phone using the open source phone-switcher Asterisk. The game reads you the Zork prompts alound ("You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike") and you speak your navigation to it ("Go north") and it plays the game out for you, turn and turn again. It's open source under the Perl artistic license.
I was tinkering with Asterisk and the Festival text-to-speech engine, and wrote some short Asterisk::AGI scripts to read back live weather reports. After that, I thought I needed something more interactive to work with…
Then I had a flashback to 1996, first year university, standing in the C & O club at the University of Waterloo, where someone had just pulled out their US Robotics Palm Pilot and started up Zork. A couple of hours later, after a quick trip to the campus computer store, I was playing Zork in the palm of my hand!
Now Zork is back! Listen as the eerie voice of Festival takes you into the Underground Empire, and marvel as you explore this world with your dial pad, unlocking the secrets within! What will Asterisk bring us next? The future is open!
(via Make Blog)
