Call Forwarding Inbound DID

With the holidays coming up, I needed to forward calls from our Vicidial into an external number.

Under the Inbound DID Settings:

• Set "DID Route" to EXTEN
• Set "Extension" to dialplan prefix + countrycode + area code + number

Unfortunately, I tested it and found that there is a significant delay with the sounds. On top of that, there is a long silence. I need to find out why there is a long silence and if I can replace that with ringing so the caller doesn't feel like he/she got dropped.

To be continued...

Source:
http://www.vicidial.org/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=25793

Long Silence at the Start of Inbound Calls

It's my first time setting up an inbound call and I ran into a problem where after the initial 2 rings, there's a long silence before the greeting plays. The longest was 17 seconds!

If I were the customer and there was no sound for 17 seconds, I'd hang up immediately. Customers hanging up mid-way isn't a good thing, of course.

Here are the steps I did to remedy the situation:

1. Make sure the DID points to the IP address you need: It will take longer to route the calls to the right place if you have 2 or more servers. I had our DID provider remove the 4 other unnecessary IP addresses which shaved off 10 seconds.
2. [Update: Don't do this! I ended up having a lot of outbound calls dropped because asterisk couldn't find this file] Remove sip-silence.gsm from the sequence: Observing asterisk logs, when an inbound call arrives, sip-silence.gsm is played twice before the first greeting. I'm too scared to tinker with the asterisk script (it's a really long text of code) and remove the 2 lines of sip-silence. Instead, I just renamed sip-silence.gsm into sip-silence2.gsm so it would skip playing that file. This shaved off another 3 seconds. Aside from removing sip-silence.gsm, I was thinking of replacing it with a ringing sound. However, I can't find the default ringing sound in the asterisk folder, so I chose to just remove sip-silence.gsm instead.

From 17 seconds of long silence, I was able to cut it down to 4 seconds of silence.

ERROR: sounds_list CENTRAL SOUND CONTROL IS NOT ACTIVE:

I'm setting up an inbound campaign and I wanted to use a recording we made for our voice mail. When selecting the audio-chooser, I encountered this message when I was selecting an audio-prompt for when there's nobody available to answer.

"ERROR: sounds_list CENTRAL SOUND CONTROL IS NOT ACTIVE:"

Steps to Fix:

1. Go to Admin >> System Settings
2. Change the following items:
   - "Central Sounds Control Active" and select "1" instead of "0".
   - "Allow Voicemail Greeting Chooser" and set to "1"
   - "Sounds Web Server" to whatever IP address you are currently using. Make sure it's not the default "127.0.0.1".
3. Click on the Audio Store in the Admin System Settings in the left menu. The most striking message there should be "We STRONGLY recommend uploading only 16bit Mono 8k PCM WAV audio files(.wav) "
4. Upload the audio file for the recording.
5. Go to the voice mail entry and there will be an option for "Voicemail Greeting" with "audio chooser" at the right side. Click on "audio chooser" and select the .wav file you just uploaded.

Source:

• http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?t=23888
• http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?t=9724
• http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALforum/viewtopic.php?t=20786