Custom Prompts and Music on Hold

In many places, you have the option of playing prompts or music on hold to the caller in your contact center or your switchboard. pascom already provides a large number of pre-made prompts. However, it is almost always useful to create your own prompts, e.g. to greet your customers or to announce business hours.

Creating a New Prompt

Now the “space” for the prompts is created for the time being. In the Name field, enter a unique and descriptive name for the prompt. Example: “Greeting_BusinessHours”.

Click the Save & Details button.

After you have created a new prompt or selected an existing prompt, you can edit the details and upload or create the audio files for the various language channels. A separate box is displayed for each language channel (e.g. German (de), English (en)). To create or edit an audio file for a language channel, click the Edit button in the respective language channel box.

Creating or Uploading an Audio File

In the editing mask for the language channel, you have three options for creating an audio file:

Recording a Custom Voice Message via Telephone

With this option, you can record the prompt directly via your telephone.

Specify an Audio File from Your File System

With this option, you can upload an existing audio file (in WAV format) from your computer.

AI-Generated Text-to-Speech

With this option, you can enter text that is then converted into a voice message by artificial intelligence (AI).

After you have created or uploaded the audio file, you can listen to the prompt using the Play button. Click the Save button to apply the changes.

Backing Up Your Own Prompts

You can download all your own prompts in a .tar.gz package by clicking on Action in the prompt overview and then on Export Own Prompt Files. Under Import Archive with Prompt Files, you can upload existing prompts all at once. However, these must also be packaged as a .tar.gz archive.

Adding More Languages

By default, the languages German and English are available on the pascom. If required, further languages can be added. In the Admin UI under the menu item Settings > Languages, then Add. Name the language and enter an abbreviation.

After saving, you will see the newly created language in the overview.

Managing Music on Hold

You can find the music on hold in the Admin UI under Call Distribution > Music on Hold.

In pascom, you do not select individual pieces of music to be played, but entire playlists. The playlist (class) default is included in the scope of delivery. This includes a piece of music that has been released by the Asterisk developers and is therefore royalty-free.

If you tick a playlist, you can display or delete the individual pieces of music under Action > Music Pieces. If you want to upload new pieces of music for this playlist, select Action > Upload Music Piece.

Compatible formats are WAV and MP3 files.

You can also create your own playlists via Add. You can then select which playlist is played in the team under Music on Hold, for example. In support, you can play music on hold that refers to your ticket system and in sales, you can present the latest promotions.

If you put a caller on hold via telephone, the default playlist is always played.

Create and Upload Prompts and Music on Hold on a PC

For the best possible recording quality, we recommend creating the prompt on a PC and then uploading it to the pascom. The format of the audio file is almost arbitrary because pascom will automatically convert it to the appropriate target formats after uploading. We have achieved the best results by using a standard WAV file as the source.

Create Prompt with Audacity

A good, free and platform-independent program for creating prompts is Audacity.

The use is quite simple. Select the appropriate microphone (see screenshot “Built-in Microphone”), set the volume and start recording by pressing the red Record button.

If you are satisfied with the result, select File > Export and create a WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit PCM. If you want to edit the project again later, it is also recommended that you save it File > Save Project.

Add Background Music to Prompts

For example, for Christmas prompts etc., it is popular to add background music to them. Audacity is able to manage several audio tracks.

Record your prompt as already described and then select File > Import > Audio. Select a piece of music and import it. Audacity then creates a second audio track. If you now press Play, you will hear both the recorded prompt and the music.

You will notice that the music drowns out the text on the one hand and that it is not nice that the music and the prompt start at the same time.

To have the prompt start slightly offset, click in the prompt audio track before the start of the prompt and add approx. 3 seconds of silence via Generate > Silence … This measure means that the music starts first and the prompt starts after 3 seconds.

To make the music quieter, use the envelope tool. If you click into the audio track with the envelope tool and move the mouse up and down, you will notice that you can change the volume of the audio track. If you repeat this in several places, all the relevant places in Audacity are connected with an envelope line. In addition, small white points appear there.

The end result should look something like this:

If you are satisfied with the result, select File > Export and create a WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit PCM. The audio tracks are automatically mixed together.

If you want to edit the project again later, it is also recommended that you save it File > Save Project.