Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.0.6

Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.0.6

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. It is always exciting to design and build your own telephony system to suit your needs, but the task is time consuming and involves a lot of technical skills.This book comes to your rescue, helping you to set up a telephony system fast and easily using FreeSWITCH. It will take you from being a novice to creating a fully-functional telephony system of your own. It is rich with practical examples and will give you all of the information and skills needed to implement your own PBX system.The book begins by introducing the architecture and working of FreeSWITCH before detailing how to plan a telephone system and moving on to the installation, configuration, and management of a feature-packed PBX. You will learn about maintaining a user directory, XML dial plan and advanced dial plan concepts, call routing, and the extremely powerful Event Socket. You will finally learn about the online community and history of FreeSWITCH.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
FreeSWITCH 1.0.6
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
Preface
The History Of FreeSWITCH
Index

Chapter 6. Using the Built-in XML IVR Engine

The built-in IVR (Interactive Voice Response) engine is a powerful component of the FreeSWITCH system. It allows messages to be played and interactive responses (usually touch-tones) to be processed, in order to direct calls to particular destinations. It can ultimately allow callers to hear information without needing to speak to a live person, select options that enable/disable features, or enter data that can be used in account, billing, or other operations.

Most people are familiar with an IVR as an auto-attendant that answers a main number for your company and provides a list of options to reach people (that is, 'For sales press 1, for support press 2'). This avoids disruptions to unintended call recipients, and reduces or removes the need for a dedicated receptionist. More advanced IVRs can also be used for collecting information from a caller, such as a caller's account number or the PIN number for a conference bridge. In this chapter, we...