Auto Attendant is a flexible utility designed to greet callers and transfer them either to an existing PortaSwitch accounts, or to your current phone system.
8.1 - Basic concept
- PortaUM Auto Attendant (AA) is composed of a set of menus.
- All the menus are the same in every respect, except for the ROOT menu, which is always present and cannot be deleted, and whose name cannot be changed.
- When a caller dials the system, AA will answer the call with the Intro prompt from the ROOT menu.
- After this, the Menu prompt will be played, and AA will listen to the user input.
- The user input will trigger execution of the following available actions:
- Default - plays the default prompt from the current menu
- Transfer - transfers the call to a given telephone number or extension
- Menu - starts interpreting (executing) the selected menu; the user can choose from any of the available menus
- The user may select whether the corresponding prompt is to be played prior to the action.
A menu call flow chart is displayed in the diagram below:
- Auto Attendant can be selected from the Options menu. The main screen lists all the menus available in the system.
To modify one of the existing menus, select its name from the list.
To add a new menu, select Add new from the action panel.
- After selecting one of the existing menus,
please allow all the prompts to load in your browser; this may be
viewed on the status indicator in the action pane.
The fields of the Menu Edit screen are explained below:
Name
A logical name for the menu, i.e. Sales for a sales department
Active
Time
definition when the current menu is active. To set the menu as always
active, select the Always button on the right. PortaUM also provides
users with a Period Wizard, a flexible tool for defining a time period
of any complexity.
- These three fields work similarly to the Voicemail recording feature.
Record. Select to
start recording your voice prompt. (You will need to connect a
microphone to your computer sound card to use this feature.)
After the existing prompt is recorded over, the Undo icon becomes available, allowing rollback to the previous state. The blinking Play icon indicates that the existing prompt is being overwritten, but changes have not been saved yet.
Stop. Select this to stop recording or playback of the recorded message.
Play. Select this to play back the recorded prompt. When selected, this icon will turn into Pause.
Each of the icons above may appear in grayscale, meaning it cannot be accessed because some other task is active.
To give your Auto Attendant a professional sound, we recommend using a professional speaker and a digital recording studio when recording voice prompts.
To upload a prompt, select the Browse... button on the right side. The native audio file format for the system is the following:
Type: NeXT/Sun (Java) file .auFormat: G.711 u-Law
Attributes: 8,000 Hz, 8-bit, Mono
PortaUM uses SOX - Sound eXchange, a universal sound sample translator for prompts uploaded into the native UM format.
Here's a short list of supported audio file formats:
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| .aiff | AIFF files used on Apple IIc/IIgs and SGI. |
| .au | SUN Microsystems AU files. |
| .gsm | GSM 06.10 Lossy Speech Compression |
| .mp3 | MP3 Compressed Audio |
| .ogg | Ogg Vorbis Compressed Audio. |
| .wav | Microsoft .WAV RIFF files. |
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Event | Not Active - if the current menu is not active (see the active period definition above) 0-9, #, * - user selection on telephone keypad Timeout - no selection received from user |
| Action | Default - play the default prompt from the current menu Transfer - transfer the call to a given telephone number or extension Menu - start interpreting (executing) the selected menu; the user can choose from any of the available menus |
| Play before action | Check this box if the corresponding prompt is to be played before the action is performed |
| File | File name and path |
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.