Auto Attendant

The Internet Gate can be used as an auto attendant (requires purchase of license).

An auto attendant answers incoming calls, plays audio messages, and allows people make selections using the keypad of their phones. (“press 1 if you want to…”)

The below is only needed if you run a firmware older version 5.34; for version equal or newer 5.34 the creation is done automatically with the reboot after you bought the license.

Before you can start using auto attendants you need to create the Internet Gate internal auto attendant component, and initialize it. Clicking the Create button creates the necessary internal components, and initializes them. You must reboot your Internet Gate before you can start using auto attendants.

Audio files for the auto attendant are stored on the attached USB stick, in the directory /ivr. They have to be in .wav format, 8kHz sampling rate, mono, PCMA or PCMU encoded. You can copy them to this directory on a PC, or record them using the Record button on the auto attendant GUI page, where you must specify a file name and the telephone to be called for making the recording. The audio files are listed on the auto attendant GUI page, and the names as shown in this list can be used in the menus below in the field “audio file name”. There is even the possibility to use audio files (in the format as above) which are located on a http server in the network, in that case the full network path for these files has to be specified (e.g. “http://myserver.com/audio/welcome.wav”).

You can create interactive menus users can navigate through using their phones' keypads. For instance first selecting what department they want to reach, then selecting what person in that department they want to call.

You can have multiple submenus. For each menu you enter a descriptive menu ID, and select what audio file (from the files listed in the Audio files section above) to play. Then you can specify what will happen depending on what key user presses on their phone's keypad. For each keypress you can select one of the following actions:

• Transfer to the entered SIP address - transfers the call to a human
• Go to menu ID the entered menu ID - implements submenus
• Hang up finishes the call
• Replay audio starts the konfigured audio file for this menu again from the beginning
• Start recording and Stop recording are for creation of an audio recording during handling of an incoming call to the auto attendant (will be saved in the directory /ivr on the USB stick), and only for expert use.

The auto attendant can also collect digits entered by the caller and use them as part of a SIP address to call.

After the auto attendant executes a Transfer-to action, it normally hangs up the call itsself immediately.

When you add this tag after the Transfer-to destination (e.g. “john@abc.com;nextMenu=PLAY_TRANSFER_MESSAGE”), then the auto attendant will not hang up itsself immediately, but instead go to the specified menu (here it has the menu-ID PLAY_TRANSFER_MESSAGE) and continue processing in that menu, which you can e.g. set up to play an audio file with the content “Please wait, your call is being tranferred”. The callers client will switch over to the connection to the Transfer-to destination after the Transfer-to destination answers the call.

To use this option may also be usefull in cases where the caller otherwise only hears silence after the initiation of the transfer until the Transfer-to destination answers (e.g. if there is a back-to-back user agent between the caller on one side, and the auto attendant and the Transfer-to destination on the other side). Instead of playing some announcement during that time you can of course also use an audio file which contains a ringtone.

You may want to set up your auto attendant to have a different handling of incomming calls during after-office-hours, at the weekend or during lunch time than during normal office hours. To achive this, you use the scheduler for incomming call handling, in combination with the ;dtmf-digit= tag.

The basic concept is the following: You set up an entry menu for the auto attendant which works like the following: “If now are working hours, press 1; if it is now weekend, press 2; ….”. But this intial selection is not done by the caller, but automatically by using the scheduler function; Set up the scheduler function for your auto attendant e.g. like this:

This way, the scheduler will give an intial dtmf-digit to the auto attendant processing, which is used to go to different menus for office hours and non-office hours. Set the auto attendant entry menu up like this: