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.

298 Day mode test
299 Night mode test

300 Sales queue
301 Support queue
0   Reception queue

From designated internal phones you can record new greetings.

Record greetings

351 Greeting
352 After hours greeting
353 Main menu
354 Main menu farewell
355 Support menu
356 Support response
357 Support farewell
358 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.