API for controlling VICIDIAL

[irfanlateef]

Hi,

I have an application which needs to do voice broadcast of recorded
messages without any agent/human interaction.
I am planning to use Asterisk+VICIDIAL for it.

From the understanding of the VICIDIAL application I think this can be
done without the GUI by just manipulating the VICIDIAL tables in
the MySql Asterisk database as following.

(1) Create an entry in vicidial_campaign table.
(2) Create N entries in vicidial_list for the phone numbers
set the status to active.

(3) Set the campaign status to active = Y

There may be few more steps but to illustrate point I just listed a few.
All the above steps can be doen use MySql scripts from other apps.

And when the campaign goes active the background cron scripts will
load it into the hopper and dail-out and make the calls and play the recorded message.

After all calls are completed the list can be deleted and the process
can repeat all over again when a new list of phone numbers are received.

I would appreciate your comments on this concepts especially the
pitfalls and other issues I may have not addressed.

Also I would like to find out if there is an API to control the VICIDIAL
in lieu of the using the GUI.

Thanks and Regards,
Irfan Lateef

[mflorell]

Yes, there is an API for VICIDIAL in the SVN trunk codebase, but you don't really need to use it if all you want to do is voice broadcasting with no live agents, you can just set a Remote Agent to ACTIVE and it will dial on it's own without need of being reset until the leads run out. It is even aware of call time schemes that you may have set for the campaign.

[roll72]

hello,

do you have any source code available of your broadcasting application ?
did you succeed to setup an application to do it ?

thanks in advance for your answer

[roll72]

Hello Irfan,

I was asking myself if if it is possible to get your source of your broadcast appication using vicidial ?

thanks in advance for your answer

[Op3r]

its on the manual.

Almost everything is on the manual. How to use the features are all in the manuals.

Get the manuals at www.eflo.net/store.php

spend 100 usd on it. It will be the best and wisest decision you will do in your call center life.

[roll72]

Hello,

I purchased the manual from my beginning in Vicidial. But the chapter explain how it works in case of a live remote agent, but not the behavior on a remote agent setup for an autmatic ouboud campaign. So if anyone got some feedback on this point, I will appreciate.

thanks in advance

[mflorell]

This is because remote agents aren't really designed for auto-dial outbound campaigns, you can use them but it is not recommended due to the added lag time.

[roll72]

I used remote agent as defined in the 'full' manual, does there is any other method to make autdial outbound campaign ?

I am trying to write a small application which is populate the vicidial table to make broadcast survey with '1/2/3 DTMF' choice and then hangug.

It looks remote agent is a good way to start/stop the campaign and if the 'number_of_lines' is limiting the concurrent call, it ensures many campaign for many scenario could be launch in same time without any delay for each of them.

do you think it is a good idea ?

[mflorell]

Yes, for Survey campaigns it will work just fine. If you want to hangup on the respondants after they press 1,2,3 then just set the Remote Agent dialplan number to 8300.

[roll72]

It is exactly what I'm doing : set the survey_xfer_exten to 8300.

But what I didn't catch is the relation between number_of_line in remote agent table and the number of call the survey could do in same time ?

Another question : what is happening if I not setup a number of trunk per campaign in the server page ?

[mflorell]

What is the campaign dial method and dial level set to?

[roll72]

hello,

we have a similar discussion on another topics :

number of trunk is setup per campaign in the server setting

dial method is RATIO (I let it as defined in the manual)

adaptive_maximum_level is 3.0

Concurrent_transfer is AUTO (I didn't know what is hte purpose of this field)

[Sentel]

Im new to vicidial. Just came to know yesterday. So apologies if my question is novice..

How Many simultaneous channels can be used for Voice broadcast for case described in this topic? Will it be processor intensive? Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Sentel

[roll72]

All depend on your machine,

for my prototype, I was using a netbook acer aspire one and got about 13 trunks voip, and the machine was handle it very well