[asterisk-dev] Voicemail Call Transfer

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Monday 07 July 2008 09:11:44 Richard Laager wrote:
> I work for a local telephone company. We're paying a company for some
> changes to be made to the Asterisk voicemail application. Most of the
> changes are to the call tree so it behaves like our old system (so we
> don't annoy our customers who have built up extensive muscle memory).
>
> However, one feature seems like it may be useful to others and I'm
> wondering if there's interest in accepting a patch upstream. The feature
> is to allow users to press a key during the greeting to get forwarded
> somewhere else. For example, I might say in my greeting, "This is
> Richard Laager. I'm not here. To try my cell phone, press 1. Otherwise,
> leave me a message." If the caller presses 1, the system places a call
> to my cell phone and ties it to the caller. This gives the impression
> the call was forwarded. (Our understanding is it can't actually be
> forwarded because there's no way to send a "flash" through a channel
> bank.)
>
> The key mappings are currently obtained via ODBC.
>
> Does this seem like a feature that you'd like upstream? If so, from the
> above description, are there any caveats we might want to address
> preemptively before we submit a patch?
>
> Right now, I'm asking about the feature in concept, not the particulars
> of the patch, because we're going to have to expend effort (= $$$) to
> separate these changes out from our other changes, so I'd rather only do
> that if people are interested.

That feature already exists, in the 1.6.0 beta.  It's enabled by the
d(<context>) option.  Basically, if you enter any digit that is a valid
extension (or start of an extension, for multi-digit options), Voicemail
will immediately exit to that context (either waiting for additional digits
or proceeding immediately for unambiguous single digit extensions).

The only caveat is that Voicemail does not currently set a channel variable
with the authenticated username.  You could emulate this, though, by using
the VMAuthenticate application first, then calling Voicemail with the mailbox
returned, as well as the 's' option to skip authentication.

-- 
Tilghman