Due to the current issues with receiving incoming Google Voice calls when using the Asterisk channel drivers, I decided to revert to the previous method of using a DID to bring in the incoming calls. It’s the only method that seems to work 100% of the time right now. But there is a difference in operation that I need to account for. When I brought calls in from the channel driver, there was a line in the code in extensions_custom.conf that answered the call as soon as it arrived. This, among other things, prevented Google Voice from taking the call back after 25 seconds and sending it to their voicemail.
Now I am bringing these calls in on a trunk on which I have several DID’s, some of which are used for Google Voice and some of which are not, and I don’t want to prematurely answer the DID’s that are not handling Google Voice calls. So the challenge is to only answer certain DID’s as soon as they arrive. I thought I had found the answer on this page:
http://www.freepbx.org/support/documentation/module-documentation/inbound-routes
One of the options it lists there is “Immediate Answer”, but when I go to an Inbound Route page in FreePBX 2.8 the only settings I see under “Options” are Alert Info, CID name prefix, Music On Hold, Signal RINGING, and Pause Before Answer. So, what happened to the “Immediate Answer” option? Is it a bug that it’s not showing up? Was it removed for some reason?
So that brings me to my ultimate question: What’s the best way to do an immediate answer on an Inbound Route, prior to ringing the destination extension? The only way I have found is to first send the call to an Announcement (I created a recording with a fraction of a second’s silence for the purpose) and then from the Announcement go to the ultimate destination, but that seems more kludgey than ought to be necessary. Is there a better way to do this that I’m overlooking?