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Replace voicemail welcome message with an MP3 on an extension

Posted by ci_newman on Wed, 02/17/2010
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Thirdlane platform General Questions

One of our customers wishes to use a custom computer generated welcome message (which I can create) on an individual extension mailbox opposed to the default "please leave a message" audio playback.

We're using the generic "tl-goto-voicemail" script for the voicemail re-direct and the mailbox obviously allows us to record a new message from the handset via the menu options however the admin and user portal doesn't allow for manually uploading an MP3.

Presumably, once we've recorded a message from the handset we should just be able to replace the created audio file with our own? Where is this file located? Is there a better way of doing it than this?

Regards,

Chris

Submitted by k3leland on Wed, 02/17/2010 Permalink

The greetings are stored in /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail/CONTEXT/EXTENSION/.
Where CONTEXT is usually "default" but could vary by config and EXTENSION is the extension number.

The two greeting files are:
busy.gsm
unavail.gsm

This is also where the audio for the voicemail messages are stored along with meta information.

Submitted by eeman on Wed, 02/17/2010 Permalink

1) MP3s are attributed to 92 different patches as a result of a catastrophic crash of asterisk. Use anything, wav, WAV, gsm but dont use MP3 unless you enjoy dropped calls and angry customers.

2) if you dont want asterisk to say 'please leave a message' then add 's' to your options box in addition to the u or b. Without the 's' no matter _what_ you record or put in place of busy.WAV it will still announce the instructions. Those instructions are not appended to the recording

3) whats wrong with just recording directly from the handset? Are you trying to mix in some music or something? As stated in #2 what you think is in the recording is _not_ in the message recorded from the phone, its played just before playing that message.

Submitted by ci_newman on Thu, 02/18/2010 Permalink

Thanks for the replies so far.

The reason the customer wants it configured this way is that the mailbox is on an extension used for their general inbound sales calls. Instead of stating "please leave a message" they would like it to say "Thank you for calling Company-A, please leave a message" and due to regional dialect they would prefer that this message is via a computer generated voice (in this case, Serena-UK) rather than the spoken word.

I was unaware that MP3s are linked to multiple Asterisk faults, I'll look to implement in either GSM or WAV instead.

Regards,

Chris

Submitted by ci_newman on Mon, 02/22/2010 Permalink

Thanks for the help guys, just one final question.

When directed to the mailbox for extension-xxx, I hear my new pre-recorded message however despite using the 'su' option under other mailbox options, the message is still being followed by the vm-intro instruction.

Any ideas why this is still playing?

Regards,

Chris

Submitted by ci_newman on Fri, 07/16/2010 Permalink

This may help to stop others wasting time trying to fix a non-issue like I did, but if a user records a temporary message, that message will *always* play back regardless of what other options are specified for the mailbox / tl-goto-voicemail scripts..

You learn something new every day! :-)