Creating an IVR (voice menu) in FreePBX

Now that you have your professional recording created in Audacity (see my other post), now you need to make the backbone work so that when your sexy voice says 'press 1 to speak to sexy me' that it actually reaches you, not your mother.

I'm pretty sure (but don't quote me on this) that you MUST have a trunk and some inbound/outbound routes set up before doing the IVR. If I'm right, i save you many headaches. If I'm wrong you're no further behind. So just start this part near the end of your PBX (Princess Ballerina X-ray) project.

Go to your control panel and then click IVR. On the right click 'Add IVR'. Give it a name that you'll remember, like 'General Voice Menu'.

Go to the bottom of the IVR options and enter the numbers in the little boxes on the left that you want people to press. click the drop down to make sure that when they press that number that it goes to the right destinations. Of course you have to have extensions before you even start this process so if you haven't done this, put this post on hold and go and make some extensions.

Most importantly, make sure that your actual voice recording is linked under 'announcements'. So, click the drop down and choose your audio file that you already prepared to play for the callers as per my other post.

-save
-apply configuration changes
-continue with reload
(always do the above anytime you want your changes to be remembered. It's a good habit)

Now your IVR is set up. However, will it play your recording? And when? You have to think of the IVR as a 'pseudo-extension'. It must be the destination of a call, basically.

In our case (and probably the most common case) we want it to be the message/menu to appear when a regular phone caller (PSTN) calls in. So, they hear a message (the recording you made) and then get the menu. Here's how you do it:

go to 'inbound routes' on the left side of your control panel
click your DID (donkey incoming dad) number. It's your voip number and you must have already set it up before beginning this part, so, like above, if you don't have one and need one, go get yourself a DID number so PSTN callers can call you from their cell and landlines.

Got your number? Configured it? Disposable Joe may do a quick post on that but your DID number provider MUST be able to give you the configurations. If they can't change.

So, you've got your extensions set up.
You've got your trunk set up
You've got your inbound route set up
you've got your voice menu recorded and in the right format and uploaded to system recordings

So, you click the DID number that you have already set up (we're still in 'inbound routes' here, btw). Go down to the bottom and you should see, as long as you've set up your IVR as per above, this:

Set Destination
Terminate Call:
Extensions:
Voicemail:
IVR:

Put the radio dial to 'IVR' and then select the IVR you just created as per above

-submit
-save
-apply configuration changes
-continue with reload

MT@Vancouver

EDIT:
The IVR was techinically "working" , but when we called in, we could not hear the announcement message.

The reason was that the recordings in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom/ or the directory "custom" did not have the right permissions (this is still a mystery).

I did an ls -l /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom to find the permissions set:

-rw-r----- 1 apache apache 441044 Jun 16 09:08 090525_current2.wav

Apache? Why apache? , anyway I changed the owership:group of the folder to asterisk and made it recursive:

chown -R asterisk:asterisk /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom

-rw-r----- 1 asterisk asterisk 441044 Jun 16 09:08 090525_current2.wav

Now the menu played when we called in...

DJ@Paris