Brand new, need an IVR starting point

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

hello there all,

i have been given the task of creating an ivr system that will phone our customers to tell them when the status of their machines change. It also needs to give them a message when they call in.

so, i am brand new to this. we bought a dialogic card and i tried to get it working in debian and ubuntu to no avail.

too much had to be configured from source and then bayonne did not want to play with it.
i discovered asterisk from the ubuntu forums. so my big question is,…

what would be the simplest , and least expensive piece of hardware out there that is easy to configure in asterisk ? i will not be seeing high traffic at all from this thing, maybe a hundred calls a day. And where is a good place to learn how to build what i need to do software wise ?

thanks for any and every starter tip.

2

simplest , and least expensive piece of hardware out there that is easy to configure in asterisk ?
Depends on what you are going to hook it to? T1.Pots Line, VOIP provider.

For info check out this site

voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk

3

um… thanks for the link, i guess i had not gotten that far yet, we were going to hook it up to a phone line. Is that a ridiculous thing ?

like i said, i am just starting out here, and google had me running in circles.

thanks

4

ridiculous thing ? not at all
if you want to hook to a plain old telephone line the you have 2 choices you can use an ATA device or uae an analog interface card such as the Digium TDM400

5

if you want to do a ‘proof-of-concept’ you don’t need to hook asterisk to anything except the network…you can just connect with a softphone and do all of your testing that way…

plus, it’s the easiest to configure, because there’s no hardware to configure! just install asterisk, set up your dialplan, and go!

if you need help with a specific step, i’m sure somebody here can help.

6

cool, thanks much, i am sure i will be back here for help soon.

thanks again

7

nuther couple of questions…

by softphone, do you mean something like skype or ekeiga ?

and if i get an analog card to work, the IVR would be able to respond to an incomming touch-tone signal, and deliver a message (we have them stored on the hard drive as .wav files)

thanks

8

This softphone works well with asterisk and is good for testing.

xten.com/

9

cool enough, thanks