Re-recording IVR On the Fly

ksdpbx · August 2, 2024, 3:11pm

It may be my Friday brain missing something obvious, so forgive me if there is a quick / obvious answer I’m missing:

We had a request from our communications director to be able to re-record a message on the fly in the IVR. It’s not possible in our current PBX, but I was trying to find ways with FreePBX.

I know with feature codes, the user can dial a number and change a system recording. However, I imagine she is wanting to do something like change it to:

“Thank you for calling. Note that today, Friday, August 2nd, schools are closed due to [reason].”

And then continue on with the rest of the tree (which is a long one).

Is there a way have her record an announcement like that, and have it somehow append to the front of the regular IVR announcement? Otherwise, I’m picturing her having to re-record the entire announcement. That appending would be nice too if there was a way that that could automatically be done (with dialplan code I imagine).

Essentially, she’d like it to be so she can record announcements on the fly for callers if school ever gets canceled for something like snow and I’m not awake at 3:00 in the morning to change things when they might make that decision.

Let me know too if that doesn’t make sense.

dicko · August 2, 2024, 5:01pm

You can set a ‘feature code’ for admin-> system recordings, call it Addendum, then ‘over-ride’ the [ivr-n] context into ‘extensions_override_freepbx.conf’ then replace IVR_MSG with IVR_MSG & custom/Addendum

lgaetz · August 2, 2024, 5:18pm

Set the call flow as Inbound Route → Announcement → IVR

You can assign a feature code to re-record the Announcement system recording as needed without affecting the IVR recordings.

dicko · August 2, 2024, 5:38pm

But then change the grammar from

to

"Today, Friday, August 2nd, schools are closed due to [reason] but thank you for calling . . . "

ksdpbx · August 2, 2024, 5:45pm

Looking into that. Also realized I used the wrong word, meant to say “prepend” and not “append.” Just simple swap in the dialplan anyway.

I’m also testing with @lgaetz 's proposal. Some weird inbound route issues for me right now, but that’s unrelated to what I’m trying to get set up.

dicko · August 2, 2024, 5:49pm

No, if you prepend then as @lgaetz said, just add the ‘standard’ system recording and use that in the IVR

ksdpbx · August 2, 2024, 7:43pm

Kind of unrelated, but on the path to make sure I can mark this thread as resolved: I’ve done “dialplan reload” a few times and even restarted FreePBX, but somehow my Inbound Route is still holding onto old things. Any idea how to make it update?

I did a grep for the inbound DID to make sure and only found it in the extensions_additional.conf file. What’s in there is still what was there before (despite the restart and reloads). The GUI looks like this, note the “Set Destination”

Note too the “No” for “Detect Faxes”

However, the config file shows:

exten => 5091111111,1,Set(__DIRECTION=INBOUND)
...
exten => 5091111111,n(did-cid-hook),Noop(CallerID Entry Point)
exten => 5091111111,n,Set(FAX_DEST=ext-fax^3365^1)
exten => 5091111111,n,Set(FAXOPT(faxdetect)=yes)
...
exten => 5091111111,n(dest-ext),Goto(ext-meetme,13770,1)

The faxdetect is set to Yes as you can see, and the destination is a conference (which it originally was, but I long changed that when trying to test the IVR stuff).

dicko · August 2, 2024, 8:18pm

5091111111 vs. xxxxx5495 ?

ksdpbx · August 2, 2024, 8:30pm

Sorry was just obfuscating the numbers.

AaronM1 · August 7, 2024, 5:16pm

Fellow school system phone guy here, we have a setup to do exactly this, and it’s working well.

It amounts to setting up a system recording that only has a single sound in the file list, so that it can be changed via a feature code. then adding that file into the system recording that has the full menu and recordings for the complete IVR.

So for every school, we have two entries under System Recordings: “ES - Schoolname - Custom Intro” and “ES - Schoolname - Main”. Then the custom intro has just one file in the list, something like “custom/es-schoolname-custom” and the feature access code and pin are configured. The “main” one has like 10+ things in the file list: “custom/thanksforcallingSchool, custom/if-you-know-your-parties-ext, custom/es-schoolname-custom, custom/menu/frontoffice, custom/press1…” etc.

The ivr announcement is then pointed at the “ES - Schoolname - Main” sound, and it plays everything as intended. Then the school knows their FAC and PIN, and their custom intro updates in the IVR when they change it.

I can add screenshots if this isn’t clear enough, I just don’t feel like turning off my chrome dark mode hack to make my screenshots look “normal” Also, happy back to school time to you, posting here is helping me take a break from the tickets that are already piling up!

ksdpbx · August 7, 2024, 5:44pm

Glad to hear it’s working well! If you wouldn’t mind, screenshots would be nice, sorry!

Happy last bit of summer to you! I love when teachers tell us to enjoy the summer or, later, ask us how our summer break was. We don’t get summer breaks, haha. Summer is the best time to get things done, when the buildings are generally empty. Though I did take a week off in June for a train trip. Next big project is replacing 1,300 phones in our current phone system with newer ones (as 950 phones alone are 20+ years old, in use long before I started here and were new when I was in school (fittingly I started replacing the phones at the elementary school I went to for K-5)).