Playing different soundfiles while caller on hold

[ronator]

Hello everybody,

I am not sure, if this is the right forum but I can remember someone else asked this question anywhere else in here before me. But maybe after some time there were changes ? I strongly miss one feature and I even have no idea for a work-around (for sure, I am not a pro).

Re: [asterisk-users] interrupting MOH

Matt Florell
Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:19:49 -0700
Hello,

We achieve this using an AGI script in the VICIDIAL project for our
version of inbound queues. You start MoH then when you stream a sound
to the channel it will stop MoH then after the sound is done you start
MoH back up again. Probably a bit more involved than what you want,
but it dose work well for us.

If the caller is in the "queue", I don`t want him/her listen to *ehm* somehow boring music for longer than one minute. So, there is the option to set one intervall and play one file like generic_hold. This ought to be 9 seconds or less (well, at least in vicidialnow). I`d like to choose from a "pool of soundfiles" and maybe soundfiles that are longer than 9 seconds ... Does ViciDial also misses this feature ? Just being curious, is this feature on your roadmap for vicidial ? I think it would be a great feature to play different soundfiles to customers, could be used for "commercial breaks" or just for giving the On-Hold-File-Option much more flexibility, so you could play ... whatever you want ... maybe 5 similiar but different announces that will "calm down" the inpatient caller depending on the wait_time ...

Since I am about to migrate our heavily loaded vicidialnow-single-server to a "more convient" system (all vicibox, 1 DB-WEB + 4 phone-server) and since I really have to think about using hardware-timing (sounds like hell to set up), so since the whole system will change, I could put one more machine in this setup, let me call it "queue-moh-soundfile"-server. I have not thought this setup to the end (tired now), but would this be a solution ? To setup a machine, that handles the call-processing / call-flow and if an agent in the "cluster" is ready, it just sends it to him ? Are there customers that use such a setup ? I cannot believe I am the only one who`d die for this feature ...

Or do I really have to modify the agi-inbound-script ?If I modify the code with kinda loop that randomly chooses between different files, and if I let them all be 9 seconds max., could I run into any problems (provided that the code is clean) ? I assume, it isn`t that easy at all :) And, last but not least, why just 9 seconds for generic_hold files ? What`s the reason for this limitation ?

thank you for reading.

[williamconley]

when entering hold for ingroup, there are several options. try them all and see how they work for you.

You have a welcome message, music on hold (which can be loaded from any length/type music files you choose), a hold prompt (which can double as a commercial), plus the hold time option settings which can also intervene and play more sounds at that time interval (and even though you CAN allow options at that point, if you don't mention it to the prospect, it's just another method of playing yet another sound file).

[mflorell]

You can set up Music On Hold right in the Admin web interface. You can choose the audio files you want it to play from the audio store and you can set it to play them in random order if you like.

[ronator]

Thank you, Matt and William, for your answers.

You have a welcome message, music on hold (which can be loaded from any length/type music files you choose), a hold prompt (which can double as a commercial), plus the hold time option settings which can also intervene and play more sounds at that time interval (and even though you CAN allow options at that point, if you don't mention it to the prospect, it's just another method of playing yet another sound file).

After I had a look into the inbound.agi I saw that the on_hold_prompt_filename is realized as an array. The pipe-char | seems to be the "delimiter". That reminded me of the "No Agents No Queuing"-option where under "Audio File" I find this: nbdy-avail-to-take-call|vm-goodbye. So is it possible to use the same construction with all sound-option-fields or at least with on-hold-filename ? Furthermore, in the code is the limitation of "less than 10 secs" ... just for me to understand it: why just less than 10 secs ?
The point is with your suggestion, that a welcome message is only played once, and the on-hold-prompt is far to short for my requirements. And as far as I can see, the holdtime option settings don't provide what I need. Yes, I could send a caller after 60 secs somewhere else and then returm him to the same in-group, but I am unsure if this "caller-flipping" is a "nice setup". But what Matt said sounded interesting. I'll answer his post next. Thanks so far.

[ronator]

You can set up Music On Hold right in the Admin web interface. You can choose the audio files you want it to play from the audio store and you can set it to play them in random order if you like.

Oh yes, I have to confess that I began with vicidialnow 1.1 and this "audio store" didn't work for me out-of-the-box and since it was a productive system, I didn't want to play around with it. But you reminded me of it. And yes, defining a moh with multiple files is somehow a chance to reach my goal. Don't feel offended, it still seems like a fake for me, because, correct me if I am wrong, when I use the moh for this functionallity, then the moh will be processed among all channels. If a customers dials in right when the "commercial breaks" are played, he/she may listen to an interrupted sound-file, because of the nature of moh, right ? But I will try this out, and see if it works for me. Thank you again for showing me the obvious ;-)

[mflorell]

No, that's not how "files"-type music on hold works. It starts a MoH session for each participant, meaning it can start each MoH session at the beginning if you want it to for each listener.

As for the on hold prompts, they are limited because the customer cannot be sent to an agent while they are playing, which is why you would never want to put multiple long audio files in there.