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

Phrase Macros and Voice Prompts


Phrase macros are FreeSWITCH's smart way to reuse, concatenate, and combine sound files into voice prompts to be played in calls.

Voice prompts are what you hear when you call into any kind of IVR, digital assistant, and so on. The most infamous of them is, "All our operators are busy at the moment, please hold on."

Voice Prompts history

Voice prompts used to be of two kinds: the very costly kind, recorded by professional actors, using high-end audio gear in professional studios, cut and polished by sound engineers in post-production. The other kind was the free-as-in-beer, do-it-yourself, very similar to the answering machine message recorded by the company secretary, unprofessional, with background noises, wavering volume, and so on.

There was nothing between those two extremes. Also, a lot of work went into recording and re-recording new prompts, reading text aloud. Such effort (and cost) made totally impractical for voice applications to read an often updated...