[Asterisk-Users] Current status of voicemail monitoring?

[Josiah Bryan]

On Friday 13 May 2005 10:13 am, Nathan Pralle wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I'm curious as to the current status and development of a way to monitor
> incoming voicemail in Asterisk.  IE:  The "screen calls with the
> answering machine" feature -- the ability to listen to and break into a
> currently-recording voicemail if you want to.
>
> This feature would be very helpful for our application.  I've seen
> various things in the archives about this but none where someone has
> said, "Yeah, we have this, it works."  Does anyone have a current
> implementation of this and/or a reasonable alternative, and how did you
> do it?
>

Hackish option --

See call come in using FOP (flash operator), watch it go to voicemail, use 
ZapBarge to listen to voicemail being recorded.

If you want to talk to the caller, use FOP and drag the incomming Zap line 
onto your phone again, then answer your phone. See FOP docs on transfering 
calls.

Hackish, but it works. I've used it myself several times. This, of course, 
assumes you are using Zap channels for incomming calls. If not, then you'd 
need to find another way to listen to incomming calls - perhaps ChanSpy, tho 
i've not been able to get that to work - crashes my * box with CVS HEAD.

Anyway, let me know if thats helpful or not, and we can play around. 

Oh, another thought: One other way to do this (and this will be comples):

1. call comes in, extension is dialed.
2. Your ext macro (assuming you use a macro for extensions) first calls a 
script to add your phone to a dynamic meetme conf.
3. The macro then dials this call to the dynamic meet me conf.
4. The script refered to in '2' should me a manger script. The script could 
use standard manager API stuff like 'action: originate' to dial to your phone 
from the meetme conf. If your phone doesnt answer, the voicemail app would 
then play the audio and record from meetme instead of directly from the 
incomming line/
5. If you wanted to listen to the caller recording VM at that point instead of 
answer the call, just dial into the dynamic meetme conf with your phone 
muted. This assumes the meetme conf was created with the 'q' option to 
disable announce of joins.
6. If you want to talk, then just unmute your phone. Only question is how to 
turn off VM. Does standard app_voicemail.o respond to DTMF to stop recording? 
Would DTMF work in the meetme to stop recording?

Anyway, those are just the top-of-the-head thoughts.

-josiah


-- 
Josiah Bryan
IT Coordinator
Productive Concepts, Inc.
jbryan at productiveconcepts.com
(765) 964-6009, ext. 224