I want to set up a soft phone for use for an office manager who has to handle car service, food deliveries, messenger deliveries etc. A (no-SIM) phone that lets them set up a Lyft/Uber, track a FedEx package and place a Seamless order is useful, but it would be more useful if we could add a number to that phone that could also be used to answer calls and receive text messages so they would get the confirmations. The phone would never leave the office, so a cell number is over the top (and it would be on wifi anyway, the reception isn’t great). I can set up the voice calling side, but I’ve been banging my head trying to work out the texting side of things. We can’t do Whatsapp or iMessages since everyone sending is probably sending an automated SMS/MMS.
Is it possible?
what clients would you recommend (Android or iOS is fine)?
Using Asterisk as the gateway for this is more of a pain than it is worth. Specially since the majority of providers use APIs for this. So you would have to hook into their APIs then hook that into Asterisk to send to phones, which cant accept MMS, and then do the reverse to send out.
Better off doing this with the SMS Connector module and using the UCP to manage SMS.
Any phone support for MMS is likely to be proprietary, as the basic SIP MESSAGE facility is text only.
Asterisk doesn’t support SMS for analogue phones (a feature available in the UK). I don’t believe it supports it for anything but SIP phones. Asterisk isn’t a SIP PABX it is really an ISDN PABX with SIP, and many other options added on.