Asterisk autoattendant

Here are my notes on building an autoattendant system with Asterisk

Put everything for the autoattendant in /etc/asterisk/autoattendant.conf and then "include" it in extensions.conf.

From any internal phones you can directly dial these extensions to test the system.

401 Day mode test
402 Night mode test

700 Sales queue
750 Support queue
0   Reception queue

From designated internal phones you can record new greetings.

Record greetings

301 Greeting
302 After hours greeting
303 Main menu
304 Main menu farewell
305 Support menu
306 Support response
307 Support farewell
308 Invalid input message

Festival

For testing I use Festival to convert text to speech. I also use it for voice menu items when I don't want to record a custom message.

You need to install and run festival as a service so that asterisk can send it text and get a WAV file back to play. You can run it on localhost, it's not very resource intensive nor do we use it much.