Create my own IVR program

I am looking for a software that will allow me to create my own IVR program e.g. when consumers dial the telephone number provided it would say the following …. Welcome to my company, press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts, press 3 for promotions or press 4 to speak to an operator.

You can start with Voicent Flex PBX software. The usage of the product is described in the product walkthrough (from program main menu > Help > Product Walkthrough…). It should be easy to set up an auto attendant as you described above.

If you need more flexibility, such as to read the promotions information from a database or website, then you can use Voicent IVR Studio. You could also import your Flex PBX design to IVR Studio. For details, please take a look at the product walkthrough also.

I would like to know once the program has been created using your software, what other product or service do I require in order to activate this service onto my phone line.

Voicent software works with 1) any SIP based VOIP service (Voicent release 7), 2) Skype, and 3) Traditional phone service. SIP and Skype should be pretty easy to setup since they do not require any additional hardware. With traditional phone service (PSTN), a voice modem is required to connect the phone line to the computer. There are limitations of using voice modem, for example, it works only on system running Windows 2000/2003/XP.

To learn more, just download the IVR software and give it a try. It should be easy to setup the whole application and test it out.

Having downloaded the trial version of IVR studio software & then created the auto attendant program, I was still unable to get the designed program implemented onto the phone line. The voicent gateway displayed the following error message:

Error No phone line. Cannot make phone call

What I don’t understand is why did it display the above error message because I have 2 telephone lines, which are stated below:

PSTN BT line
Sipgate account on the computer system.

Both of the above come with 2 separate telephone numbers, but its still displaying the same error message (Error No phone line. Cannot make a phone call). Please can you advise me on what I could do in order to rectify the problem.

In order for a computer to make and receive phone calls, a voice modem is need to connect the computer to the PSTN line. So if you do not have a voice modem, the gateway is not going to be able to use your PSTN line. For more information about modem, please see Modem FAQ

In your case, it is easier just to use your sipgate account. To setup sip for Voicent Gateway, please see SIP setup. Please note, only Voicent release 7 has SIP support.

Once you configure the gateway with modem or SIP, the gateway should be ready to answer incoming phone calls.