Send Voicemail

Question

I'm looking into ways of sending a voicemail message (ideally as an audio file) to a number of mobiles/landlines in the UK (anywhere up to 300 people, but we can do them in batches if necessary).

Has anyone had any experience trying to do this?

Answer 1

Asterisk can certainly make calls, not just recieve them.

We use Asterisk, a VOIP provider, and a cepstral voice to send alarm calls. If no one answers, it leaves a message.

It can be a bit fiddly getting it to detect the answerphone correctly, but we've got it working with most of the ones we've come across so far.

Answer 2

Asterisk and probably other softswitches like (Freeswitch) could do that for you. The Asterisk voicemail config file, voicemail.conf, allows you to specify a command to run whenever a new voicemail is left in a user's mailbox. You could create a custom script or application that would do the forwarding for you.

Alternatively you could do it without any programming at all by creating an email alias for the 300 people and then assign that email address to a particular Asterisk mailbox. Asterisk supports voicemail to email by default so there wouldn't be any special configuration provided.

And you could probably also avoid setting up Asterisk by finding a VoIP provider that supports voicemail to email, which most of the Asterisk based ones do, and forwarding the voicemails to your own email alias address. In this case you'd just want to be careful about who could leave messages!

Answer 3

I would recommend Katalina 'VoiceGuide' - a windows-based CTI, IVR and dialler system at a reasonable price, supporting both tradtional POTS/ISDN telephony cards and VoIP. see: www.voiceguide.com