"Measure Twice, Cut Once"
My grandfather always used to use the phrase "measure twice, cut once" - meaning - always double check before you do something to make sure you haven't done something silly.
I find myself telling that to my kids now so I guess it must be a good piece of advice... I only wish I had taken note myself and done it...
In our offices in Kampala we have just installed a new VOIP phone system using the open source sipxecs server(http://www.sipfoundry.org/).
Telecom provider
I had to pressure our phone line provider quite hard to get a phone number that was going to be easy to remember and eventually managed to get one that we liked which is +256 (0) 312 FLY MAF or if you don't have a phone handy to work out the numbers associated with the letters =256 (0) 312 359 623.
One of the great features of this server is the Auto-Attendant feature - you know the one that says "Welcome to MAF , press 5 for bookings..." etc. and so I had written out the text for this mentioning that we have changed our telephone number, make a note of it and so on.
I put the system out live last Friday - but only this morning while I was explaining to one of the members of staff how the phone calls came in to our system, I realised that I had writen down and read out the wrong number! DOH!
Fortunately, after borrowing the bosses Skype headset I recorded the correct messages (there are actually 3 of them as we have a work hours, out of work hours and public holiday versions) and quickly removed the offending recordings and uploaded the correct ones...
However, I would like to apologise to the people who copied down the incorrect phone number and tried to call us on it. I would also like to extend this to the actual owner of the number I did give out (I am hoping that it hasn't been assigned to anyone yet..).
Technical Bit
Recording Auto Attendant Prompts
I like to use Audacity - it's very nice and simple interface, and to record a new prompt, follow the instructions here:
- Make sure you have the script ready to read out and you are confident in reading it
- Open a new audacity recording
- Make sure that the Project Rate (Hz) at the bottom of the page is set to 8000
- Click on the record button (red circle) and read the script. When done click on the stop button (yellow square)
- Click on the "Audio Track" icon with the downward pointing arrow and select the "Split Stereo to Mono" option
- Click on the X to remove the second audio track that has appeared
- Click on the "File" menu and select the "Export" option
- Save the file as a "WAV (Microsoft) signed 16 bit PCM" with a meaningful name
Remove the existing ones
For those that are interested, in order to remove a recording from your SIPXecs server - the only way I could find is to SSH into the server, and look in the directory:
If there are any user recorded prompts (I am glad I used sensible, meaningful file names!) then that is where you will find them. The linux 'rm filename' command will get rid of the files you want to remove leaving you to upload the new prompts through the web interface to the SIP server.
Upload the new prompt to your Auto-Attendant(s)
Load up your auto-attendant:
Where it says "Prompt" click on the choose file - and upload the WAV file you saved earlier.
If you use different prompts depending on the time of day and on Public Holidays (as we do) then don't forget to upload those as well.
Once you are done with that - check your Voicemail Dial plan that will use them and ensure that the settings and recordings are correctly set .... there's another "Check twice, cut once" story as well.. but let's not go there.
