I'm looking for an easy way to make asterisk perform as a basic (broadcast)autodialer. Basically all I want to do is give it a list of phone #'s and a pre-recorded message and have it call each one and play the message or leave it on the person's answering machine. The people I'll be calling are all our customers, etc. so I don't need to do any do-not-call checking. Just call and play the message and move on. Trying to find a way to notify a couple hundred customers that their service has been changed. Anyone have any easy ways to do this? I already have a functioning asterisk server with a POTS interface, etc. thanks Shawn
shawnl at up.net wrote:> I'm looking for an easy way to make asterisk perform as a basic > (broadcast)autodialer. > > Basically all I want to do is give it a list of phone #'s and a > pre-recorded message and have it call each one and play the message or > leave it on the person's answering machine. > > The people I'll be calling are all our customers, etc. so I don't need > to do any do-not-call checking. Just call and play the message and > move on. Trying to find a way to notify a couple hundred customers > that their service has been changed. > > Anyone have any easy ways to do this? I already have a functioning > asterisk server with a POTS interface, etc. > > > thanks > > Shawn > > _______________________________________________ > --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- > > asterisk-users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >This can be done with an easy script and call files.... However.... The problem you'll run into is with waiting for an answering machine. To my knowledge, there is no way to listen for "the beep". So you have 2 options. First, you have it dial the other person and when it "connects" just let her rip and hopefully it wasn't an answering machine. The situation is okay when a person is picking up at the other end. Or second, you could have it wait for "connect", then have it wait 10 seconds, then play. In most cases, this is usually okay. The problem there is that if its a person who picks up, they will hear dead error for 10 secs. You could have have a long message that says.... "please hold for message from 'your company'" then have it wait for 10 seconds, then play. This kind of covers both bases, but no guarantees people aren't just going to hang up on it. Hopefully this helps a little.
Shawn,> Just call and play the message and move on. Trying to find a way to > notify a couple hundred customers that their service has been changed. > > Anyone have any easy ways to do this? I already have a functioning > asterisk server with a POTS interface, etc.Set up a dial plan extension that has the effect of calling each number. Rather than building a dialplan entry for each number, just make it require the prepending of a special prefix that is then stripped off, not entirely unlike how trunk groups are used in TDM routing: exten => _666NXXXXXXXXX,1,Macro(dialer-macro,${EXTEN:3}) Or do it all without the use of macros, whatever. Have it Dial() the customer at ${EXTEN:3}, Background() or Playback() a recording, then hang up. Then, load your target numbers into a text file. Write a script to iterate through them, and trigger the dial plan extension through the Asterisk Manager API: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+manager+API It's a simple, TCP-based CLI service and is by far the easiest way to do this. If you have a sound card in the source machine you might even be able to get away with calling 'console dial ... at context' from the Asterisk CLI (asterisk -r -x -c), but I think the Manager approach is cleaner. Let me know if you need some help getting this up and running, I've done such things before and have some code readily available. If so, contact me off-list. Hope that helps, -- Alex Balashov Evariste Systems Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel : +1-678-954-0670 Direct : +1-678-954-0671
Call files and app_amd (Answering Machine Detection) come to mind.
app_amd can take a little time to tune, but you can get it to be pretty
reliable in most cases.
See: http://www.voipinfo.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+cmd+AMD
http://www.voipinfo.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+auto-dial+out
Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer