I’m a new member so apologies if this has been answered before, but can Asterisk be used to automatically dial and play a pre-recorded message to many phone numbers? For example, a file will contain 2000 numbers to call and play a warning message to. Most examples I’ve read so far address inbound calls and outbound calls originated by a human.
Any help or pointers to what I should read would be great. Thanks.
have a peek at voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+auto-dial+out
for info on creating .call files. there was someone either on here, or on the mailing list recently looking at similar functionality for a political campaign.
it won’t be difficult to do. out of interest, how many lines do you have for outgoing calls ?
Yes, this is possible. You would need to use the ManagerAPI to do this for you:
voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+manager+API
I have had scripts written for commericial applications, as well you might take a look at VICIDIAL:
Thanks for replies. Creating call files looks like an easy starting point.
In answer to question about number of outbound lines, we will be using quad E1 cards in multiple servers (5+) so want to make 600+ simultaneous calls. Anyone know of any problems with 600+ call files?
VICIDIAL is capable of doing this. It is GPL and part of the astGUIclient suite. Not sure if it’s overkill for your application, but it does have an auto-dialing application that lets you call numbers from a database and play a messages to the calls that are picked up.
It is scalable and can work across multiple Asterisk servers.
At the levels you are describing, call files are probably not the way to go for many reasons.
For example, call files do not readily allow for monitoring the call results and acting upon them. With call files you would have to do send variables with the call file and then pick out the details from the CDR, but not elegant.