Apart from these, every consultant at Apps is Digium certified- the creator and the sponsor to open source, free-ware Asterisk. All them went through hands-on training and after the completion, they were required to build and configure an actual PBX system, and on successful completion to gain a dCAP certificate. A written exam was also required, to scale the knowledge on Asterisk and other related VoIP technologies. Apps Communications certification covers the most current, stable version of Asterisk. Every dCAP certified personnels have priority access to Digium technical support, in addition to numerous other benefits. Unlike many other “paper” certifications, the dCAP provides members with valuable services, while providing customers with assurance that their Asterisk consultant is fully qualified.

An Apps Communications Asterisk consultant can help you out with the following services:

• Configuring an Asterisk telephone system
• Maintain an existing Asterisk telephone system
• Implementing new or custom Asterisk telephone features
• Enhance existing Asterisk features to fit your needs
• Integrate an Asterisk telephone system with third party applications, such as a CRM application

Asterisk In The Call Center

Asterisk is deployed and made use by multitudes of call centers round the globe. The software is very flexible and gives easy options for both call center and contact center developers to built complete ACD systems based on Asterisk. The Asterisk has also added a new life to every existing call center solutions by providing remote IP agent capabilities, predictive and bulk dialing, advanced skills-based routing, and many more. The Asterisk Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs) helps create call centers to handle thousands of simultaneous calls, and routing them to agents based on caller input, dialed number, load and other factors. The ACD systems typically cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and require specialized training to install and operate. Asterisk makes it possible for you to build a powerful ACD with no additional cost other than server hardware and phones.

What Does Asterisk Do?

Asterisk can be considered just like an erector set or a box of Legos for everyone who want to create communications applications.Its for the same same reason, we refer to it as a “tool-kit” or “development platform”. Now, the Asterisk bundles every required building blocks and tools that are necessary to create a PBX system, an IVR system or virtually any other kind of communications solution. For you to setup things accordingly, Asterisk provides the following:

• Drivers for various VoIP protocols.
• Drivers for PSTN interface cards and devices.
• Routing and call handling for incoming calls.
• Outbound call generation and routing.
• Media management functions (record, play, generate tone, etc.).
• Call detail recording for accounting and billing.
• Transcoding (conversion from one media format to another).
• Protocol conversion (conversion from one protocol to another).
• Database integration for accessing information on relational databases.
• Web services integration for accessing data using standard internet protocols.
• LDAP integration for accessing corporate directory systems.
• Single and mult-party call bridging.
• Call recording and monitoring functions.
• Integrated “Dialplan” scripting language for call processing.
• External call management in any programming or scripting language through Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI)
• Event notification and CTI integration via the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI).
• Speech synthesis (aka “text-to-speech”) in various languages and dialects using third party engines.
• Speech recognition in various languages using third party recognition engines.

This situation leaves many 21^st century organisations in a bit of a quandary. Companies that stretch across the globe are used to bringing their best minds together to create ideal solutions. But in a world that moves faster and faster by the day, it is no longer possible for people to meet face to face. For example, if a company with offices in London and New York needs to meet urgently there is no time for an executive to hop on a plane. By the time he or she arrives at a meeting the opportunity could have already passed.

If technology has created this problem it has also created the answer: conference calls. Conference calls allow people to hold instant meetings. Great sound quality removes any distraction and allows colleagues to get straight to important matters. With this innovation meetings can be conducted at the new pace of business. Many companies already use conference calls to increase their efficiency, and as the world moves faster and faster, many more are sure to join them.

When we deal with bulk outbound calls sometime there is a chance to miss calls if you are using call file as a mechanism for auto dial out. This is called asterisk choking. when too many files are moved simultaneously into the outgoing directory. Therefore it may be advisable to move them step-by-step with a slight delay.

Solutions to overcome this Asterisk choking

1) Using Manager API is a solution

2) Feed the outgoing folder with less number of calls simultaneously.

3) Find the cause and fix it in the source code.

4) Find out apt time delay between copying of call files.

There are certain prerequisites to make the application works.

1) Internet connection enabled asterisk server for pulling information from 4INFO.

2) Ceptral voice synthesizer for asterisk

Add a SIP user with an that points to the context “hotspot” with extension 9434 which is actually WiFi on the keypad of the softphone or mobile phone.

Add dialplan for the context hotspot in extension.conf.

[hotspot]

exten => 9434,1,Answer
exten => 9434,2,Wait(1)
exten => 9434,3,Set(TIMEOUT(digit)=7)
exten => 9434,4,Set(TIMEOUT(response)=10)
exten => 9434,5,Flite(“At the beep enter the zip code for the Why Fye Hot Spots list to retrieve.”)
exten => 9434,6,Read(ZIPCODE,beep,5)
exten => 9434,7,Flite(“Please hold a moment while we contact Four Info dot Net for your report.”)
exten => 9434,8,AGI(nv-wifi.php|${ZIPCODE})
exten => 9434,9,NoOp(Wave file: ${TMPWAVE})
exten => 9434,10,Playback(${TMPWAVE})
exten => 9434,11,Hangup

Log on to the server as root and navigate the folder “/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin” using the terminal.

cd /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin
wget http://nerdvittles.com/wp-content/nv-wifi.zip
mv nv-wifi.php nv-wifi.old.php
unzip nv-wifi.zip
rm -f nv-wifi.zip
chmod 775 nv-wifi.php
chown asterisk:asterisk nv-wifi.php

vim /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/bv-wifi.php

Update this variables.

$paywifi = 1 ;
$freewifi = 1 ;

$ttspick=1;

We have to create a tts directory which is the place where sound files created during the execution of AGI.

Log on to the server as root and navigate the folder “/var/lib/asterisk/sounds” using the terminal.

cd /var/lib/asterisk/sounds
mkdir tts
chmod 775 tts
chown asterisk:asterisk tts

Done with configurations. You have to clean the tts folder on a periodic basis, use some crontab for that. If you are not doing this some kind of issue may pop-up which destabilize the asterisk sever with signal and sound issues.

How it operate with a phone?

1) Dial 9434

2) It will prompt you to enter a 5 digit zip code in US.

Now you can hear hear the report, if you are not hearing anything, that means no hot spot available.