I’m new to asterisk, and until now it went pretty well! I already have a pretty simple dial plan and all works good.
But now I have a feature i want to add:
When someone calls me, he gets to a menu and for example presses 1 to contact me, then asterisk calls me and my phone rings,
BUT, when I answer it, I hear a recorded message telling me, let’s say, the caller ID, and asking me what to do with it,
for example, 1-accept the call, 2-send him to the voice mail, 3-send him to a different phone and so on.
Only when I press 1-asterisk connects between me and the caller.
I have no idea how to do it, but I assume this is possible, as asterisk is a super powerful system!
You should be able to do this starting a macro when someone calls you, in the macro wait for one dtmf, then set a channel variable and then execute the subsequent actions based on the value of that channel variable; to start the macro use the M flag of the third paramter of the Dial application.
From the book Asterisk TFOT 2nd:
M( x [ ^arg ])
Executes the macro x upon the connection of a call, optionally passing arguments
delimited by ^. The macro can also set the MACRO_RESULT channel variable to one of
the following values, to determine what should happen after the macro has
finished:
ABORT
Hangs up both legs of the call.
CONGESTION
Acts as if the line encountered congestion.
BUSY
Acts as if the line was busy. If the j option is specified, it sends the call to
priority n+101, where n is the current priority.
CONTINUE
Hangs up the called party and continues on in the dialplan.
GOTO:^^
Transfers the call to the specified destination.
There is a privacy mode in Dial and some specific DIALSTATUS values (e.g. TORTURE) for this sort of application. TFOT doesn’t seem to explain them well. However it is documented, e.g. in http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/branches/1.6.1/doc/tex/privacy.tex and the PDF documentation generated from it.
