New to Asterisk -- need suggestions for a new project

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Hi all,

I’m new to Asterisk, and need to know which components to research to get a system up and running with the following capabilities for an appliance we need to drop into a customer’s existing infrastructure:

1- User dials a specific extension
2- The existing phone system detects the extension and routes it to the asterisk machine
3- Asterisk engages in an IVR script with the user
4- Asterisk takes the results of this conversation/script and makes web service calls to our web/app server
5- Asterisk notifies the user via their phone call that certain actions took place.

So, that’s the basic flow I’m looking for. Here are some initial questions:

1- Which asterisk pieces/components/add-ons are needed to achieve a system such as this?
2- What sort of hardware needs will there be for the asterisk device?
3- What sort of connection is required from the existing phone system to the asterisk machine?
4- What considerations need to be made to get this multi-lingual? (Initially will be English/Spanish)
5- Do people in general use a text-to-speech system for IVR systems? or do you generally pre-record speech files to play back during the IVR session?

Thanks for guidance you guys can give me! I’m looking at getting something researched/detailed soon, so that a true architecture and system implementation can take place.

Kevin

2

Alot of your questions would be answered by a quick search or just by learning the basics. Try looking for information about dialplans and even check this out voip-info.org/wiki/view/Aste … s+ivr+menu.

Using scripts in asterisk, you can use AGI.

What is your existing phone system? You mention a few times about having that interact with asterisk but you dont mention at all what it is.

Multilingual is easy. You would have seperate recordings for the desired language. This can be set by a cmd in the dialplan to switch and the recordings are kept in separate folders. voip-info.org/wiki/view/Aste … i-language

The best way to do prompts is to use pre recorded audio. There are txt2speech solutions but are not the best for actual production.

Sorry its all broken apart from your list. I’m just quickly going through to try and answer some fast.