Automatic phone call from website

I looked into your products a number of months ago when we were evaluating and designing the structure of a new business opportunity. At the time I felt your product would do the trick for us. At this point we’ve have developed a website and are now ready to incorporate your product. I would like to describe to you what I’d like to do and have you let me know if indeed it is feasible and how best to get started.

An application running in the back ground will monitor for new entries into the database. If a new entry is found, it will instigate a phone call using the Voicent Gateway. When the party receives the call they will be given a pre-recorded greeting and a phone tree of options to hear.

If the call got through and someone responded or if the call failed, I would like to enter that information into the database as well.

Our web application and back-office apps are written in PHP.

Please confirm that what I’ve described is possible with your application and how we can get started writing our application and test it.

Yes, you can definitely implement that using Voicent software.

The integration basically involves the following:

1. Trigger a phone call from your application
2. Specify the interaction/application for the phone call
3. Collect call status

Trigger a phone call from your application

Voicent Gateway contains a built-in web server and an outbound call scheduler. To make or schedule a phone call, simply post a HTTP request to the following address:

http://:8155/ocall/callreqHandler.jsp

where is the computer name or IP address of the computer running the gateway.

In the request, specify the necessary parameters such as phone number and time to call. For details, please see Outbound call scheduler reference

Specify the interaction for the phone call

For simple phone calls, such as playing an audio file, or have text-to-speech engine to speak a text, the application/interaction is included in the call request parameter. In your application, you will have to dynamically generate the call interactions as a VoiceXML application. VoiceXML is a W3C standard for interactive voice applications.

The best way to create these VoiceXML files is to use Voicent IVR Studio, which allows you to specify your call flow in a GUI environment and automatically generates the target VoiceXML files. You can then take the generated VXML files as a starting point for your application – basically a lot of print statement from your PHP program. By doing this, you do not have to learn the VoiceXML and don’t have to struggle with syntax and other details.

Once you are done with the VXML application, specify starturl in the call request.

When Voicent Gateway makes a call, it will first send HTTP request to the specified starturl to get the initial VXML content (you do not have to actually create a file). Then based on the callee choice, the gateway will get the next VXML content by a url specified in your VXML content.

As you can see, all this is dynamic and flexible – as long as the gateway can have the next VXML content, you can do anything in your PHP program, such as to record a callee response (a key press) to a database.

Query Call Status

Certain call status, such as line busy, not answer, are issued as VXML exceptions. You need to handle these exceptions in your application in order to get these status.

The integration should not be that hard. You do not have to deal with any telephony aspects of the call, all are taken care of by Voicent Gateway. To application developers, it is the same to create an automated phone call application as any other web application.

To get started, please see Outbound Call Tutorial