Voicemail and languages

General Help
1

I am pretty new to FreePBX and Asterisk, but my research so far have not uncovered much here.

I want our system to support 2 languages (English and French) for calls coming in through our Canadian inbound routes.

So far i have added the language and set up French. I have also installed the french sound files from Asterisk and that gives me a fair amount of french prompts, but with many still missing, so the narration is kind of a blend of French/English.

But when it comes to voicemail, I would like a caller that selects to switch to french at the IVR prompt, to be able to listen to French busy, unavailable or name messages from our users. So our users should be able to save both messages in french and english and thus match the user selection.

Also we want to be able to deliver email notificatons in french for those extensnion that are setup as French. The only thing that I found that comes close to that is AskoziaPBX, but it seems to be done with some non standard Php file that write the voicemail.conf file. How does it work with FreePBX?

Also when I engage the follow me action and the system plays the remote announce that i created, it uses the default english one (sounds/custom/waitForParty.wav) even if i have one with the same name under sounds/fr/custom/waitForParty.wav. Again how can i make sure that it picks the right sound file.

I am probably forgetting about other related settings as I am just starting to dig into the system.

Thanks
Alain

2

move the waitForParty.wav recording to sounds/custom/fr

In general, everything you are trying to daye (other than the notification emails) should be doable using the language module. Just set on destination for french and point to it form the ivr

3

Thanks that worked. What I am not sure here is where to put all the language specific sound files, as what I got from Digium doesn’t seem to match what I saw on some posts and what you are mentioning.

Should all language specific files go under sounds//xxx
or should they be like sounds//xxx and sounds/dictate//xxx and sounds/digits//xxx

Any idea about how to make the VM recording in multiple languages as well ?

Thanks again for the great tip.

Alain

4

they should be like sounds/xxx and sounds/dictate/xxx and sounds/digits/xxx

5

For those who didn’t get the above, you must place your language files in a sub directory in the sounds/ directory.

You’ll have a directory listing like this:

/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en/
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en/dictate
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en/digits
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en/letters
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/en/phonetic
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/it/
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/it/dictate
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/it/digits
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/it/letters
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/it/phonetic
/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom/

As a side note:

Make sure that you update the permissions on your custom sound files so that asterisk can read them.