Page 326 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

he will be limited to system activities allowed by that account. When Asterisk is run as
root, a security compromise gives the intruder full control of your system.

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 more than 300 system prompts in the main distribution, and an additional 600
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).

The Voice

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 a powerful concept, as very few PBXes allow you to use the same voice in your
custom recordings as is used by the system prompts.
Allison is the voice of the system prompts in both English and Spanish.
There are also prompts available in French. Montreal’s own June Wallack is the voice
#
of the French Asterisk prompts (and also does prompts in flawless English, should
you want the same voice for both languages).
To find out how to get your own voice prompts, visit the Digium web site, http://
www.digium.com/products/voice.

Once you have the recordings, the actual implementation is easy—simply 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/.
Note that the default sounds that come with Asterisk are delivered in format. We would
not normally recommend storing them in this format (unless you have a lot of channels

# We were going to say “accentless English”, but then we’d have to apologize to folks from the British Isles,
Australia, South Africa, and who knows where else. We are not experts in languages, dialects, and such, but our
ears tell us that there is a type of accent that in North America is common for professional voices. This is the
accent that is common to the Pacific coast from San Diego to Seattle, and most of English-speaking Canada as
well. Both June and Allison deliver English prompts in this accent, and we think it sounds great.

298 | Chapter 13: Managing Your Asterisk System