Interactive phiction: Zork phone demo is online

Remember ZoiP (née Zasterisk), the open source implementation of the text-adventure classic that you play on the phone? Installation required rolling up your sleeves and installing some *NIX-y stuff which, despite my urgent desire to experience this, I never got around to doing. Fine, the real reason I never got around to doing it was because the project's author, simon, promised to have a call-in number available to test the project out. Why do today what someone else will do for you later, y'know what I'm saying?

It's later and, true to his word, simon's put the public beta of ZoiP online. All it took was a little linkage from Boing Boing, Make: Blog, digg, and ... ahem ... Joystiq to get the old motivation meter up. Here's how you do it:

• Call 416-548-7557 (Toronto, ON, Canada) which is the "best quality." Otherwise try 360-226-7386 (WA, USA) which is "a little choppy."

• Or use a SIP-compliant program like Gizmo and add zoip@demo.zoip.org and dial out. This method worked the best for me (and it's free).
  

I'm not sure if it's just me, but some calls seem to go much better than others in regards to voice recognition. On some, I can roll right through, other times I'm stuck repeating myself more often than "blue" in Brain Age. He warns to speak naturally, as "careful enunciation actually seems to make things worse." Give it a shot and let us know how far you get.