We’ve built a number of apps for Asterisk over the years, and they now are available on the VoIP-info.org forum. Just search for vitalpbx to get to the downloads on page 3 of the thread.
These include tutorials to install the gTTS text-to-speech engine, Yahoo News, NWS Weather Forecasts by ZIP code, and Today in History. There also is a pbxstatus command line utility as well as a tutorial to use Gmail as an SMTP RelayHost with Postfix. Enjoy!