A true Amateur awaits

Hello Friends…
This is Prabhakaran from Thanjavur (South India). First I want to confess to you all that I am not a telephony expert or anything like that. I am working as a computer operator in an office. But I am very interested in recent technologies and also want to be having a touch in all latest innovations. Before some months, I came to know that there is software called asterisk have been developed to satisfy the modern worlds telephony needs. After hearing that I started to gather information about it. I am very excited about the capabilities of that software and the developer’s consistent effort to extending its limit. Ok, let’s come to my current scenario. Actually I am not having a landline telephone line or any other hardware interfaces (like voice modem or PSTN cards). But I am having a Nokia 6600 mobile, a Bluetooth dongle, PC suite software for my mobile. I am very eager to implement the AVR (Automated Voice Response System) System through my mobile for a longtime. Let’s explain how I want that system to be operated.
First I explain the current common process of replying:

  1. A customer contacts me about their order status.
  2. I ask the Order ID number from them.
  3. I enter the Order ID in my database search utility.
  4. Then tell about their order status.
    Sometimes customers even call after the closing time. That is the main reason I wants to implement the AVR system. Let’s see how I want it to be.
    1.A customer calls my mobile phone.
    2.A screen in my computer flashes to enable the AVR for this call or not.
    3.I enable the AVR to answer the customers call.
    4.My AVR welcomes the customer “Welcome to my company. Press to ‘1’ to know about your order status, ‘2’ to know about other options and like that.
    5.After our customer presses ‘1’. My AVR has to tell our customer to enter the order Id.
    6.After completely entering the order id, My AVR has to look up the status of the customer’s order and reply to its corresponding values.
    I definitely knew that explaining all this to a rookie, who wants to achieve it with a cell phone like me is a devastating work. I also want to say you that I having no previous experiences in asterisk. But I am very eager to learn. Can you please guide me i.e. from how to install asterisk in my pc to connecting a cell phone with it and making it database speaking. Thanks in advance.
  1. To learn the basics about Asterisk and how to install it read this good free book: downloads.oreilly.com/books/9780596510480.pdf .
  2. To connect Asterisk and your mobile look for chan_bluetooth.
  3. To build your IVR you need to learn how to write an agi script, I suggest you use php and the good php class you find at phpagi.sourceforge.net/ .

Cheers and good luck.

Marco Bruni

Thank you for an immediate reply and the links to get the proper materials. I began to download this file and will start reading after it completely downloaded. I assume that this book have some 14 to 15 chapters. By the way when I searched to know about what does mean chan_bluetooth I didn’t get a proper material. Any way no urgent for it now. First I have to read that book completely. Thanking you again.

About Asterisk and mobile look here: voip-info.org/wiki/view/chan_mobile .

Cheers.

Marco Bruni