[asterisk-users] interrupting MOH

[Brent Davidson]

Well, not necessarily.  You could have one MOH stream that gets 
interrupted say every 10 seconds with a generic message.  A caller that 
gets connected to the MOH stream might come in in the middle of the 
message, during music playback, or anywhere form 0-10 seconds before the 
message plays again.

If this is being used strictly for transferring calls, though, it might 
be pretty confusing to have "Please wait while we transfer you call." 
play every few seconds.  The caller will probably think the system is in 
some sort of loop, or that they are being routed through several 
different systems.  A less confusing setup might be to simply play the 
"Please hold while your call is transferred" message just before 
starting their MOH.

I have recently implemented Asterisk at several offices and, unknowingly 
set myself up for a huge number of complaints.  I set up our IVR to 
default to send callers to an operator queue if they did not dial an 
extension or the DTMF was not recognized.  Our main greeting lists the 
valid extensions and other info then says "Or stay on the line and an 
operator will be with you shortly."  I assumed (yeah I know ass-u-me) 
that the instructions in the greeting would be sufficient so I just had 
the system drop directly to the operator queue with MOH.  Big mistake.  
I had complaints from all three offices that customers thought the 
system was disconnecting them or dropping them into some sort of "black 
hole" when the MOH kicked in.  I changed the MOH to ringing and the 
majority of the complains stopped.  (The remaining complaints are 
related to DTMF detection problems.

Just food for thought.

Good luck,
Brent


Atis Lezdins wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 11:05 PM, Brent Davidson
> <brent at texascountrytitle.com> wrote:
>   
>>  You could also, conceivably, handle this outside of asterisk by using a
>> more complex MOH stream source.  For instance, use a shoutcast client as the
>> MOH source, run your own shoutcast server streaming your music and have a
>> script set up to periodically interrupt the stream being served to the
>> shoutcast server and inject an announcement.  (Keep in mind that this is an
>> "off the top of my head" suggestion so I don't have exact details for
>> implementation, but I'm sure it can be done.)
>>     
>
> That would need one shoutcast stream per call.. not very reasonable..
>
> Regards,
> Atis
>
>   
>>  Good luck,
>>  Brent
>>
>>
>>
>>  Matt Florell wrote:
>>  Hello,
>>
>> We achieve this using an AGI script in the VICIDIAL project for our
>> version of inbound queues. You start MoH then when you stream a sound
>> to the channel it will stop MoH then after the sound is done you start
>> MoH back up again. Probably a bit more involved than what you want,
>> but it dose work well for us.
>>
>> MATT---
>>
>> On 4/2/08, Atis Lezdins <atis at iq-labs.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>  Sorry for top-posting, but seems everyone on this thread did so.
>>
>>  Also that would be my suggestion for now - call queue with
>> periodic-announce.
>>
>>  However i see that this would make nice architectural improvement -
>>  allow inject sound files into MoH stream. This would be useful for
>>  example in call queues - to inject all the queue announcements into
>>  MoH directly, rather than play them while blocking further queue
>>  actions.
>>
>>  Regards,
>>  Atis
>>
>>
>>
>>  On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Andreas van dem Helge
>>  <joakimsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  > I think that's still a better idea than using a "dump the caller into
>>  > meetme" hack and is actually what I was going to suggest.
>>  >
>>  > If you want something simpler than a queue then inject the sounds into
>>  > the moh already.
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >
>>  > On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Rob Hillis <rob at hillis.dyndns.org> wrote:
>>  > >
>>  > > You may be able to achieve the desired result using queues rather than
>>  > > Dial statements.
>>  > >
>>  > > Overkill perhaps, but it's the only way I can think to implement it at
>> the
>>  > > moment.
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > > John Millican wrote:
>>  > > Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > > On Tuesday 01 April 2008 05:14:25 Pete Kay wrote:
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > > I am hoping someone can help me out on this. I want to be able to
>>  > > interrupt MOH every X seconds after the DIAL command is executed. The
>>  > > interrupt greeting is something like "please wait while we transfer
>> your
>>  > > call". How can I do that? Within the DIAL options, I can't see any
>>  > > announce frequency or options that can help.
>>  > >
>>  > > Could anyone please tell me how that function can be accomplished?
>>  > >
>>  > > The only way to do that currently is to implement the prompt within the
>> MOH
>>  > > stream itself.
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > > Just off the top-o-my head(YMMV), couldn't you create a meetme and play
>>  > > hold music into the meetme and then also play the prompt into the
>> meetme
>>  > > at the same time without interrupting the hold music? This would
>>  > > obviously not work for high load but...
>>  > > JohnM
>>  > >
>>  > >
>>  > >
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