Three-way transfer without DTMF

Asterisk Asterisk APIs
#1

I’m trying to implement a three-way transfer dialplan, and I’m afraid the ‘atxferthreeway’ option doesn’t quite suit our needs.

Here’s the ideal workflow we’d like:

  • Andy clicks a tel:<Belinda’s phone number> link from his browser, which opens up his softphone to dial Belinda. (Alternately, Andy may just manually enter Belinda’s number in his softphone)
  • After talking for a bit, Andy clicks a different tel:<Charlie’s phone number> link. The softphone automatically puts Belinda on hold and starts a call to Charlie.
  • Once Andy tells Charlie what’s going on, he merges the calls somehow—at this point, pressing a key or two to merge the calls would be acceptable. (We mainly don’t want Andy to have to manually enter any phone numbers)
  • Andy introduces Belinda and Charlie
  • Now Andy can hang up, and Belinda and Charlie can keep talking

So it seems possible to do this with ARI. But I was wondering if there were any other options.

One issue is that we’ve been trying to use Aria, which lets you “merge” two calls, but this really seems to just mix all the audio on the softphone’s end, so when Andy hangs up, everybody gets disconnected. Is there another softphone out there where you can configure a “merge call” button to actually tell asterisk to bridge the calls?

I’ve also thought about transparently dropping everyone into a conference room, but couldn’t figure out how to get the dialing out to work smoothly.

Thanks in advance for any help!

#2

Sounds like you need to look into the APIs provided by the softphone, rather than do this with third party control from Asterisk.

Note, if you dial from the softphone itself, any commercial version of a SIP soft phone should have built in attended transfer features. You may find that loss leader versions don’t, as this is one of the things to encourage you to buy the paid for version.

Otherwise, you can do this with the Bridge application (my experience is with AMI, not ARI).

#3

Interesting! Yeah, that’s been our instinct that we need the softphone to do things a little differently.

Do you have an example of a softphone with good attended transfer features? Is there one where you can actually configure what the transfer buttons do (e.g., make it dial *2 or something)?

Also just clarifying, in the original post I meant Bria not Aria. Bria can get us almost all the way there, but when Andy hangs up all the calls are ended. So far we haven’t figured out how to get it to actually bridge the two calls, seems like it just mixes them on Andy’s client.