Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.8

By : Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli
Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.8

By: Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli

Overview of this book

FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products, scaling from a soft-phone to a PBX and even up to an enterprise-class soft-switch. This book introduces FreeSWITCH to IT professionals who want to build their own telephony system. This book starts with a brief introduction to the latest version of FreeSWITCH. We then move on to the fundamentals and the new features added in version 1.6, showing you how to set up a basic system so you can make and receive phone calls, make calls between extensions, and utilize basic PBX functionality. Once you have a basic system in place, we’ll show you how to add more and more functionalities to it. You’ll learn to deploy the features on the system using unique techniques and tips to make it work better. Also, there are changes in the security-related components, which will affect the content in the book, so we will make that intact with the latest version. There are new support libraries introduced, such as SQLite, OpenSS, and more, which will make FreeSWITCH more efficient and add more functions to it. We’ll cover these in the new edition to make it more appealing for you.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 7. Phrase Macros and XML IVRs

Interacting with the caller without unnecessary personnel involved is an age-old telecommunications industry specialty.

Automated Attendants and Interactive Voice Response systems are two of the most important and popular services almost any organization requires for its communication platform.

Be it a simple call dispatcher, as in an Automated Attendant that routes a call, "press 1 for sales, press 2 for support", or a complex IVR that gathers proof of caller identity and then queries a database for their bank balance status, FreeSWITCH can serve it.

But what about the messages that will be read to the caller? Are we going to record every possible phrase the customer will hear?

Nope, FreeSWITCH has the "phrase" construct, a flexible mechanism to compose arbitrary phrases from short sound files, which are combined in real time, dynamically, as needed. And then, yes, there is text-to-speech (TTS) too!