Ring alert through SIP Phone

[rsaaris]

I am not sure if this feature is already implemented but I am having problems making the agent alerting to work like I would like to. Normally the agent hears everything through the head phones but I we need to have some kind of alert sound from the phone (hardphone preferably) itself also. Like normal ring tone. The on-hook agent feature is not sufficient because we need to make the call to be answered automatically. Some hardphones have Auto Answer -feature build-in but those don't really work in this kind of situation. So has anybody done something like this or similar before?

[williamconley]

Excellent post. Good job on the posting of your specs.

But I'm not sure I have your scenario. You say the agent hears everything through the head phones ... but then they have a phone as well. Agents (as a rule) have ONE phone. They hear everything through that phone's speaker whatever that may be. There is no "second speaker". Now, if you have the agent alert of some form "popping up" and the agent hears the windows "bing" tone as the result of a popup ... you are asking for the windows (firefox? IE?) popup sound to be changed. It may surprise you, but that would be handled in the web browser. I think my kids set their popup alert to the sound of a flushing toilet last year. LOL

[rsaaris]

Sorry for being little hard to follow. I ment our agents would have hardphone with normal headphones. And the alert sound should come from the hardphones speaker and the call itself would come from the headphones. This is how it works with on-hook agent. And it would be sufficient if one could set an auto answer to the on-hook agents. We can't let our agents to choose wether they answer a call or not. So if I could set an on-hook agent to auto answer a call with some delay it would be perfect solution for us. Browser popup alert sound could also work but there are some issues with that solution.

[williamconley]

Problem being, that's a function of the phone. Asterisk can only send the call to it.

Asterisk can't determine where the sound comes out of the phone or whether the phone should auto-answer after X seconds/rings.

Vicidial can send a popup, and Firefox can play a sound as a result of the popup. Or Vicidial could even "Play some background music" (which could sound like a train horn if you like). But it can't affect the phone in any way other than sending a call to it.

So ... if you wanna get weird, a second call could be generated to another line of the phone, ring once and hang up ... then ring the real line which would be set to auto-answer?

Some phones have the ability to accept html strings for display on the LCD, but I do not know if that allows for any form of sound generation on the phones (and I'm pretty sure that would be very limited to specific phones).

Happy hunting?