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).
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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.
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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.
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