High quality IVR/VM Sounds

Kristian Kielhofner of astLinux has contributed out of his own pocket, to have all of the asterisk sounds re-recorded, and has released them under the BSD License for all to use.

These sounds can be obtained from the following links:

  1. aLaw Sounds (For use in most Countries)
  2. uLaw Sounds (For use in the US
  3. GSM Sounds
  4. iLBC Sounds
  5. g729 Sounds
  6. S-Linear Sounds (The Asterisk Native format)

 

British Voice by Alison Keenan

Thanks to Alison Keenan (another Alison!) for the beautiful voice and Chris Bagnal for the conversions.  The British English files are now ready for download

http://www.sineapps.com/news.php?rssid=1312

 

New Zealand Voice by Tanya

The New Zealand Asterisk community has embarked on creating the New Zealand Voice Prompts.  The file can be obtained here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=162308

 

Using G729 natively

There are 2 reasons that I can think of why you would not do this.

  1. You are using customs sounds which are not recorded in the G729 format
  2. You have a trunk that will not accept G729

The default audio prompts provided with Asterisk are in the GSM audio format.  Few commercial products (including phones) include support for GSM, you can all but guarantee that Asterisk has to transcode the prompts when a device needs them (to access voicemail, for example).

This means if your IP phone or ATA is configured for G729 asterisk would need to transcode the sound files for you to listen to the Asterisk prompts.

If you configured your IP phone or ATA to use G729 and then used G729 in your trunk settings then there is no need for a G729 module or license.  This means however that you will not be able to access Asterisk prompts.

We can remove the GSM prompts and replace them with G729 prompts.  This will eliminate the need for Asterisk to transcode.  This will force you to use G729 on all your trunks.  If you do need to use another codec on your trunk then this will be of no benefit to you.

So if you do not want to purchase a license or load the G729 module for Asterisk then you can follow the instructions below to replace your GSM prompts with G729 prompts.

  1. cd /var/lib/asterisk/
  2. mv sounds sounds.orig
  3. wget http://mirror.astlinux.org/sounds/asterisk-native-sounds-20060209-01-g729.tar.bz2
  4. tar -xvjf asterisk-native-sounds-20060209-01-g729.tar.bz2
  5. rm asterisk-native-sounds-20060209-01-g729.tar.bz2

Information on what each line does:

  1. changes the working directory to /var/lib/asterisk/
  2. rename the folder sounds to sounds.orig
  3. download the file asterisk-native-sounds-20060209-01-g729.tar.bz2 to the current working directory
  4. expands the downloaded file into a sounds folder
  5. removes the downloaded file from your system to save on disk space

If you ensure that all SIP or IAX2 devices are configured for G729 and that all your trunks are configured for G729 you can now use G729 natively with Asterisk an not worry about G729 licenses or modules.

For more details about the Asterisk Native Sounds you can visit http://www.astlinux.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=43 and to view the different native files you can visit http://www.astlinux.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=36&Itemid=36.