Outbound IVR application for tennis reservation

Hi, We are a group of tennis players that need to reserve four public tennis courts every week. We are looking for a dialer software that could do this for us:

1. At 5:30 am every Thursday morning, using 4 or 5 Skype out account (or any similar services), the dialer would dial the public tennis court reception.
2. Once on hold, the dialer would send the #1 pound key tone every 7 minutes or so until 6:55 am to stay alive on hold and not being flush out.
3. At 6:55 am, the dialer would transfer the 4 on hold lines to 4 tennis guys of us waiting next to a telephone line for the transferred call. Or even best, the 4 guys calls in an pick the line themselves.
At 7:00 am our 4 tennis guys are on line with the reception standing by to make the necessary reservations.

Does your software do that? Is your software a good solution for us? If not, any help would be appreciated.

Yes, you should be able to use Voicent IVR Studio and Voicent AutoReminder to do the described application. This is indeed an interesting IVR application.

Here are some suggestions for the setup:

Design the IVR application

Open IVR Studio and select File > New (for AutoReminder).. from the program main menu. Create a prompt element and add audio and tone items to the prompt list. The audio file can be silent audio and any music audio for 7 minute. The tone item is a generate tone type with argument “#1″. This allow the outbound call to do 1 and 2.

Add a transfer element after the prompt element, so the call will be transferred after all prompt items are played.

Save the design, check correctness, and deploy.

For more details of IVR Studio usage, please see the product walkthrough under the Help menu.

Setup Call Transfer Phone Number

Open Voicent Gateway, select Setup > Options > Call Transfer, select “transfer call to phone numebrs”, and enter the 4 phone numbers you have in the box below.

Schedule Automatic Phone Call

Open Voicent AutoReminder, create a recurring appointment on Thursday and make the reminder call time to be 5:30 am. Make sure to select the reminder call message to be the one you just designed using the IVR Studio.

That’s it.

Posted in Outbound IVR |

TTS Plug-in and voice quality

Even with the Voicent TTS Plug-In, the voice is not performing very well, with regards to pronouncing or even being intelligible. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of settings to do anything about this. any advice?

TTS Plug-In is an enabling technology for using TTS voice dynamically for live telephone calls and for multiple lines. However, TTS Plug-In does not contain a TTS engine and voice. It relies whatever is available on your computer. The voice quality is controlled by the TTS engine, not the PlugIn.

If you use Windows Vista or later, Microsoft Windows operating system offers a free and decent English TTS engine called “Microsoft Anna”. For earlier OS, the free microsoft TTS engines like “Microsoft Sam” and “Microsoft Mary” do not offer good TTS quality.

There are other commercial TTS engines, including AT&T, Nuance, and NeoSpeech (which provides Paul and Kate voices). The best way to get these voices is to google “TTS” and you should find plenty of great quality voices online. Since Voicent TTS PlugIn has server feature built-in, you only need to get a desktop, 1 port TTS voice. The voice normally costs around $30.

Posted in IVR General |

Setup IVR using Vonage SIP

I am trying to use vonage softphone sip withyour application. Server starts fine but when I call to vonage number the gateway does not pickup and I get vonage voicemail.

After you configure Vonage for Voicent, please make sure gateway is running. Also please check gateway &gt setup > options > Inbound, and make sure “Do not pickup incoming call” is not checked.

“Do not pickup incoming call” option is not checked. Also it is configured to pickup after two rings but I get voicemail immediately after first ring. Vonage softphone is not running.

Maybe some network settings or some setting in your app. The end result it is not working. See the log file attached indicating that gateway hangs up with some error code. It will say it is disconnected number which is not true. However if I start Vonage soft phone on same PC it works fine no issue.

The error is:

SIP Error: 481 Call Leg/Transaction Does Not Exist

It may have something to do with router settings (NAT traversal). Try to set the STUN server to stun.xten.com instead of stunserver.org.

Still does not work after setting the stun server. Log files attached

Thanks for the log. Seems the OK message from Voicent does not contain the necessary codec information. Is PCMU, PCMA selected in the codec setup page? (gateway &gt setup &gt options > sip)

Hi guys thanks, it worked once the codecs are selected

Posted in IVR General, VOIP |