Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

Name

Background() — Plays a file while accepting touch-tone (DTMF) digits

Synopsis

    Background(filename1[&filename2...][,options[,language]])

Plays the specified audio file(s) while waiting for the user to begin entering an extension. Once the user begins to enter an extension, the playback is terminated. The filename should be specified without a file extension, as Asterisk will automatically find the file format with the lowest translation cost.

Valid options include one of the following:

skip

Causes the playback of the message to be skipped if the channel is not in the “up” state (i.e., hasn’t yet been answered). If skip is specified, the application will return immediately should the channel not be off-hook.

noanswer

Does not answer the channel before playing the specified file. Without this option, the channel will automatically be answered before the sound is played. Not all channels support playing messages before being answered.

The language argument may be used to specify a language to use for playing the prompt, if it differs from the current language of the channel.

Returns -1 if the channel was hung up, or if the given filename does not exist; otherwise, returns 0.

    exten => 123,1,Answer()
    exten => 123,2,Background('exter-ext-of-person');

See Also

Playback(), BackgroundDetect(), the show translation command