I’m sorry to disturb you with very simple questions, but I hope to get answers and i really believe these answers could help no only me.
So what I want to build:
We are a Tourism information center (governmental, non-profit) based in a small town with some sightseeing places. What we want to create - is a simple Automated Attendant (as I understood its not IVR) phone line.
The system would be simple:
[ul]1. Caller calls. The system greets him with a recorded message and asks to choose a language (Number 1,2,3,4 or 5)
2. Depending on language another recorded message is played. The caller now has to input a 3 or 4 digit code to listen information about a sightseeing object. There are like 30 messages in 5 languages (together about 150). Each has its own code (001,002,003…)
3. After playing the message, another message is played saying “To play the message again press 1 or enter another code”
[/ul]
And that’s all. The messages are all recorder and can be decoded to any format the software needs. There are no connections made to another lines or else.
The questions:
[ul]1. What hardware do we need (it would be great if about 10 simultaneous calls could be made). By now we have the phone line and a computer with a voice modem.
2. Can Asterisk (or AsteriskNOW) do the job? And if yes, what should we read first to understand how its working?
3. What other software do we need?[/ul]
In reality there is not a lot of difference between the two, but with automated attendants, the normal outcome is an outgoing call to the person that the caller is trying to contact.
Malcolm has vested interests, but it comes down to whether you want GUI configuration and a support contract, or whether you are confident that you can do it and maintain it yourself.
The one complications here is selecting the right language version of built-in messages. I suspect that can be done with a channel variable, but I haven’t investigated. You can, of course, use all your own messages.
We don’t really need fancy GUI’s and I think that with some time we could do the configuration ourselves. And the cheaper we can do it the better.
The top question if it’s possible with the Asterisk itself (no full recipe needed).
And what hardware do I need for that? We have an ISDN line and a pc with a basic voice modem. Is it enough or not? Do we need a specifiv phone central hardware?