If you have already heard about the Magic Button, read on because the feature set has expanded by a factor of five. This post is to inform the community about the upcoming community release of the Magic Button software, as well as the upcoming availability of the new LumenVox Community Speech Licensing Server.

Along with requests for the Asterisk Voice Recognition "Magic Button", I have had numerous requests over the last couple days for the Asterisk Voice Recognition Company Directory (AVRCD). As promised before, I am releasing the source for the company directory. Drop to the bottom for links to a demo and all the source files for the Company Directory or keep reading for details.

Some people like to have all calls follow them and ring all their phones. Others may prefer to not be bothered by every call; if the caller really needs them now, they would like an option but prefer to have voicemail handle the less urgent matters. FreePBX offers two different features that are designed for these scenarios, Follow Me and VmX Locater. But why choose between the two when you can have the best of both worlds?

Making Follow Me and VmX Locater Work Together

FreePBX is often referred to as a GUI to manage Asterisk configuration files. This misconception leads to confusion when Asterisk knowledgeable users begin to dig into a FreePBX system and find so many things that look foreign or different from what they are used to.

Overriding a Time Condition with a feature code is a request that has been asked for since as long as Time Conditions have been available in FreePBX. It comes up regularly on the forums and there have been many custom versions implemented and posted to solve this problem. We have introduced a Day/Night Control module to provide this ability as mentioned in an announcement a few weeks ago.

In last week’s FreePBX® Technical Series we reviewed the current ring strategies: ringall, hunt and memoryhunt. We clarified the mystery of the “-prim” postfix on these and discussed some subtle behaviors between DND implemented in FreePBX® (server side) versus locally on the phone.

This week’s FreePBX® Technical Series will discuss the different Ring Group and Follow-Me ring strategies in FreePBX® 2.2 and what is coming next. The basic modes will be discussed and the question: “What is that –prim” version of all the strategies?” will be answered.

I didn't get a lot of feedback from last week's article on what you wanted to hear so I scanned the forums a bit and decided the IVR generated enough questions that I would put together an article going into a bit of depth on this. Well - it grew a lot longer then anticipated but here you go. I hope this is useful, please provide comments, feedback and let us know what you want to hear about next week if you want these informational series to continue!
-philippel

IVRs - Standard Abilities, Tips and Tricks

I’ll start by thanking all the participants for the time they took to enter our contest and provide such great feedback! Choosing a winner was a hard choice – so I avoided the task and delegated it to two members of the team who independently chose a set of top winners . To my delight, my team both chose the same winners. Congratulations to both tbooth and graham!

For some people, Follow-Me does the trick. If I'm not at my desk, start looking for me always. For others, they may not want this unless the caller really needs to reach them. You can configure complicated IVRs, ringgroups, etc. to chain together but this is not manageable on a large scale. So how do you give everyone the ability to provide options to be located, on demand and that the user can manage. That's where the Voicemail VmX Locater comes in ...