PBX or IVR for Multiple Companies

Posted on April 27, 2012 | By Voicent Info

Downloaded and installed your program. Set up Voicenet gateway. (Some problems but it at least says it’s now running) I have 2 extensions set up going to 2 external numbers. I have no internal extension so I don’t believe I can do an outgoing call. When I call in (through what I believe the Voicenet gateway) my VOIP provider is playing the message that the call can not go through. So, I suspect they are not talking well with you. On their panel I do not see they are having a problem talking to you. My questions are:

1) What’s my next step to test operation?

Make sure that inbound calling has been enabled. To do this, in the Voicent Gateway, go to Setup->Options and click the Inbound tab.
The first checkbox will say ‘Do not pick up incoming calls’
This is checked by default because of the popularity of outbound Voicent programs. You will need to uncheck it.

2) If your PBX only allows one main menu, that implies I can use this for only 1 company. (I have a few companies that people call me on and I would like to have each number forward to my PC or office as needed.

In order to do this you will need IVR Studio. In the Voicent Gateway input your multiple SIP IDs. Then in IVR Studio use the system variable __VG_PHONE_LINENO__ to rout the line to your specific company.

3) If I can have more than one main auto-attendant can I limit exenstions by DID/autoattendant?

Yes, using the method outlined above.

Posted in IVR Usage | Tagged , , , , ,

Add user name to an automated message

Posted on April 3, 2012 | By Voicent

… Our computer will call the number and add the name into an automated message. “Hello, John Doo. For more info press 1, to hear the message again press 2″. the system should know if a person or answering machine has answered. if a person answers, it needs them to input a number on the dial pad, giving our system a ‘receipt’ of the call. if an answering machine answers, our system needs to hang up and call again.

IVR Application

This is a typical outbound IVR application that you can design using Voicent IVR Studio. Within the tool’s GUI environment, you can create a simple call flow graph that captures all the interactions mentioned above. The tool supports email, database, java program, and web integration so it should be easy to generates a receipt for the call, either through logging or directly saving data to your database.

We have many samples and training video for IVR Studio. You can start with the IVR Tutorial first. Once you are familiar with the tool, the following two answers are specific to your application:

1. Voicent software automatically detects live answer and answering machines. In IVR Studio, there are two top level nodes, one for live answer and the other for answering machine. You can then create your specific interaction under these nodes accordingly.

2. For every outbound call, the called phone number and name are available in your IVR app. So all you need to do is to include them (__VG_CALLED_NAME__, and __VG_CALLED_NUMBER__) in your prompt message.

Outbound Call

In addition to the IVR design tool, you’ll need outbound call capability. You can use Voicent gateway with outbound license. To trigger an outbound call using the IVR app you designed, please take a look at the Extended Simple Call Interface of Voicent Gateway. It may just be a single line of code:

call_ivr('123-456-7890', 'my_ivr_app')

For more info on this interface, please see Voicent Developer Center.

Give it a try

The best way to get started is download the software and give it a try. The free trial version has a trial message for each phone call, but there is no time limit.

Posted in Outbound IVR |

Web API to call a client

Posted on March 27, 2012 | By Voicent

I would like to find out if your autodialers can receive instruction through a web API to call a client number from my database and ask the user to press a number pad button to receive a confirmation. If so, how scalable is this product using VOIP? Thank you in advance

Yes, you can definitely do that with Voicent Gateway’s web API to trigger a call, which only requires a simple HTTP post. The second part is the call message, you have two choices: one uses the low level VoiceXML interface of the gateway, the other uses Voicent IVR Studio, a GUI tool for developing IVR applications. For more information, please see Voicent Developer Center.

We recommend you use Voicent IVR to create your app since it will save you a lot of development time. The tool has a built-in support for database, so it will be easy to update your database after a call. For press a number feature, you can simply built that by point-n-click some buttons in the GUI environment.

VOIP scalability

One advantage of using VOIP is its scalability. The main reason is that it does not require a telephony board, which has fixed number of ports and connections. These boards are notorious to setup and maintain. For VOIP, the only limitation is how powerful your computer is and how much bandwidth you have. These days, a simple Intel i7 based desktop computer, which cost a few hundred dollars, can support 100 simultaneous calls. A multi-processor Xeon based server computer can supports hundreds of simultaneous calls. In addition, if you use a cluster of servers for Voicent software, you can virtually build a call center without limit on scalability.

The best way to get started is download the software and give it a try.

Posted in Outbound IVR, VOIP |