I have been working these last days on an Asterisk over Debian, and I will be posting some tips I am learning about it, today I will post about how to record a voice message that can be used with the IVR menu.

The IVR (Interactive voice responce) is one of the most used PBX applications, and the best VoIP PBX (Asterisk) have a real good support of this feature.

Create a extension for this in the sip.conf file.

[205]
type=friend
username=205
host=dynamic
allow=all
secret=1234
context=default
qualify=no

After that, insert these lines in your extensions.conf file

Exten => 205,1,Wait(2)
Exten => 205,2,Record(/tmp/asterisk-recording:gsm)
Exten => 205,3,Wait(2)
Exten => 205,4,Playback(/tmp/asterisk-recording)
Exten => 205,5,wait(2)
Exten => 205,6,Hangup

After that you just dial the 205 extension, and save your message, after that, you will hear it, if your al happy with it just hang up, otherwise, redial the 205 and start all over again, once your are happy with your recording, copy it to the directory where Asterisk can use it.

Then copy that message asterisk-recording.gsm file, to /usr/share/asterisk/sounds/ and you are now able to use it in your IVR configuration.