Section 10.3. Customizing System Prompts

10.3. Customizing System Prompts

In keeping with the seemingly limitless flexibility of Asterisk, you can also modify the system prompts. This is very simple to explain, but generally difficult to do well.

With over three hundred system prompts in the main distribution, and over six hundred more in the asterisk-sounds add on, if you're contemplating customizing all of them you'd better have either a lot of money or a lot of time on your hands.

An audio engineer is also recommended, to ensure that the recordings are normalized to -3 dB and that all prompts start and end at a zero- crossing point (with just the right amount of silence prepended and appended).

The Voice

If you are interested in The Voice of Asterisk , she is Allison Smith, and she can deliver customized recordings for you to use on your own system.

This is an extremely cool concept, as very few PBXs allow you to use the same voice in your custom recordings as is used by the system prompts.

To make use of Allison's talents, sign up at http://thevoice.digium.com.

Once you have the recordings, the actual implementation is easysimply replace the files in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/ with the ones you have created.

Alternatively, you can opt to record your own prompts and place them in a folder of your choosing. When you refer to sound files with the Playback( ) or Background( ) applications, you can refer to the full pathname of the sound file, or to any subdirectory of /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/ .

A useful way to convert your WAV files to GSM format is with the use of the sox application. To convert your files with sox , use:

 #  sox foo.wav -r 8000 foo.gsm resample -ql  

If your WAV files are recorded in stereo, be sure to add the - c1 flag to write the files in mono. These recordings are often made through a PC, but check out the following sidebarsome people have had better luck recording from the dialplan.