Switching to VoIP

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Chapter 14: Traditional Apps on the Converged Network

Project 14.4. Create Custom Sounds to Interact with Callers

What you need for this project:

• Asterisk

• A sound recording application (optional)

• SoX (http://sox.sourceforge.net)

Interactive voice response is the backbone of voice mail, but there’s so much more

you can do with it. You could replace pen-and-paper time cards and punch clocks.

You could use it to perform billing functions, such as collecting a credit card num-

ber and storing it in a database. But in order to make all these things cohesive to the

caller (the user), your user interface will have to be customized. This means using,

and making, sounds.

Use a prerecorded sound for a simple paging routine

We’ll start with a quick little dial-plan tool that allows us to send quick emails. This

will allow us to use one of Asterisk’s prerecorded sounds. In this example, we’ll build

a basic numeric pager. It will screen an incoming call, record the caller’s phone num-

ber, and email it to an SMTP recipient with instructions to “please call” the number.

exten => *89,1,Read(PhoneNo|allison7/enter-phone-number10|10)

exten => *89,2,System('echo Please call ${PhoneNo}. | mail [e-mail]')

exten => *89,3,Playback(thank-you)

exten => *89,4,Hangup( )

Figure 14-1. Asterisk’s vmail.cgi ...