I want to prompt callers to input some information. Say, they are greeted with “in order to continue, please enter the last 4 of your social security number”.
I don’t want to look this up anywhere, at this point in time.
What I want is that when a caller leaves a voicemail, I want to include the keys they have entered for their social security to show in the email message they receive from the system.
First part is relatively easy. You would have a small block of custom dialplan that prompts caller for input and stores it to a channel variable. Often I will write that value to the CDR(userfield) so it appears in the CDR record for the call. There is a third party module call dynroute that will do it in the GUI.
The second part is very difficult. There is no native support in app_voicemail for referencing channel variables in the outgoing email. Not impossible, but not practical to consider.
Is it possible to take that channel variable and prefix it to a caller ID using a CID Prefix, so that it can be read by the voicemail to email application as the caller ID?
Thanks @lgaetz. However, I am unfamiliar with “custom dialplans” or how to program that. Can you provide some more details on how I would configure the dialplans to prompt for this? I would then pass it on to as CID prefix, which I believe makes sense in my case…
I have successfully completed part 1 of this project…
I am now able to get user input, and replace the CID name with the input provided.
Next step is to route calls based on whatever they entered.
A suggestion for your next steps would be to find an Asterisk Recipe book and write a context that handles this for you. Understanding how contexts work in Asterisk is a prerequisite to getting this part going.