Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Customizing System Prompts

In keeping with the seemingly limitless flexibility of Asterisk, you can also modify the system prompts. This is very simple to explain, but generally difficult to do well.

With more than 300 system prompts in the main distribution, and an additional 600 in the asterisk-sounds add-on, if you’re contemplating customizing all of them you’d better have either a lot of money or a lot of time on your hands.

An audio engineer is also recommended to ensure that the recordings are normalized to –3 dB and that all prompts start and end at a zero-crossing point (with just the right amount of silence prepended and appended).

The Voice

If you are interested in The Voice of Asterisk, she is Allison Smith, and she can deliver customized recordings for you to use on your own system.

This is a powerful concept, as very few PBXes allow you to use the same voice in your custom recordings as is used by the system prompts.

Allison is the voice of the system prompts in both English and Spanish.

There are also prompts available in French. Montreal’s own June Wallack is the voice of the French Asterisk prompts (and also does prompts in flawless English,^[144] should you want the same voice for both languages).

To find out how to get your own voice prompts, visit the Digium web site, http://www.digium.com/products/voice.

Once you have the recordings, the actual implementation is easy—simply replace the files in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds with the ones you have created.

Alternatively, you ...