Linux Networking Cookbook

5.9. Creating a Digital Receptionist

Problem

So far, our incoming calls are routed to extension 250, Ellen Ripley. Ellen has been gracious at playing receptionist, but she has her own work to do. How do you configure Asterisk to take over as a reliable, always courteous digital receptionist?

Solution

Instead of routing all incoming calls to Ellen, program your dialplan to route calls according to an interactive menu, and then record suitable greetings and instructions. (See the next recipe to learn how to use Asterisk to record custom prompts.)

Fire up your trusty text editor and open /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf. Change the [pstn-test-in] context to look like this:

	[pstn-test-in]
	;interactive menu for incoming calls
	exten => s,1,Answer()
	exten => s,2,Set(TIMEOUT(digit)=5)
	exten => s,3,Set(TIMEOUT(response)=15)
	exten => s,4 Background(local/main-greeting)
	
	;user extensions
	exten => 1,1,Goto(local-users,250,1)
	exten => 2,1,Goto(local-users,251,1)
	exten => 3,1,Goto(local-users,252,1)

	;send the caller back to the beginning
	;if they enter an invalid option
	exten => i,1,Playback(local/invalid-option)
	exten => i,2,Goto(s,2)

	;hangup if the timeouts are exceeded
	exten => t,1,Hangup

Now, record the greetings that will be played for callers. The first one is main-greeting, which says something like "Thank you for calling Excellence Itself, Limited. Please press 1 to speak to Ellen Ripley. Press 2 for Sarah Connor, or press 3 for Dutch Schaeffer."

invalid-option responds to incorrect key presses ...