[Asterisk-Users] Basic Answering Machine Function?

[Adam Goryachev]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 13:58 -0800, Craig Stephen wrote:
>     To do this, you don't necessarily want asterisk to be in charge of
>     your entire home phone system.
> 
>     You might rather have asterisk share the PSTN-provided dialtone 
>     with the other phones in your house, and just pick up when nobody answers,
>     take a voicemail (or play them back to you when you call in from
>     somewhere else), and hang up.

I think you need asterisk in the middle, or else after asterisk answers,
if you pickup one of the handsets, there is no method to interrupt
asterisk vm, and as you said, difficult to collect vm messages.

> 2.  Now, a more full-blown home-use scenario.
> 
>     Suppose I DO want to have asterisk run my two-line home
>     phone system, and I obtained the requisite FXS and FXO
>     interfaces - maybe the 2x2 Digium card, or maybe go SIP
>     on my side.
> 
>     Now, I'm as much a hobbyist as anyone... but my wife and kids
>     aren't.  There's no way I'm going to run a PBX at home if anyone
>     except me actually has to treat it like one, at least for basic 
>     features, like placing a phone call.
> 
>     So...
> 
>     Is it in principle possible to create a dialplan that allows
>     prefix-free dialing to an outside line, and move all the
>     "PBX-like" features behind some special prefix?

I use this context for one extension connected through a TDM card, it is
connected to a EFTPOS terminal, and I couldn't be bothered playing with
it to try and make it dial a prefix, etc...

[directdialtone]
exten => _X.,1,Dial(Zap/g2/${EXTEN})
exten => _X.,2,Busy

>     i.e. recognize 3, 7 and 11 digit numbers as phone numbers
>     and dial them without further ado, and put voicemail and
>     every other PBX-ish feature behind, say "#"?

You could easily extend this dialplan with something like:
exten => *10,1,VoiceMailMain()
etc...

>     If this is possible, has anyone come up with a dialplan for 
>     this that they'd be willing to share?

The one 'problem' with asterisk as a answering machine is that it is
difficult (I haven't seen a complete solution yet) to allow call
screening (listen to the message people are leaving in voicemail, and
then answer the call if you really want to talk to them (great for
avoiding your mother-in-law)), when you race from the other end of the
house to the phone, and 'just' miss it, you can't pull the call back
from voicemail. I think these are the two main issues, I am sure there
are methods to solve this... 

a) Use some sort of PA type system, and conference the PA channel, the
incoming channel, plus voicemail so you can hear the call as it proceeds
through vm

b) When you pickup a handset and dial xxx1, it will transfer (perhaps
using the manager API) the call on zap/1 to your
extension/parking/something and calling xxx2 will do the same for zap/2
Better might be to transfer the zap/1 to a conference, and the next step
in the dialplan is to join that conference yourself.

Of course, some or all of this might be totally wrong, so enjoy :)

I'll probably do this at home when I find enough time/incentive/money to
buy the necessary hardware (PC) and try and set it up...

Regards,
Adam