After working on other things for a while, I finally got around to figuring out how to write custom Asterisk scripts. It turns out I wasn’t reading the environment variables before launching into my perl script. As soon as I added a simple loop to pipe it to /dev/null, the script started talking as it should.
Another half hour or so and I’ll have Asterisk reading me the weather stats from my weather station. Another hour and I’ll have it telling me if an accident is blocking my commute. Now the power of computer telephony integration is mine. Bwahahahahahaha!