Asterisk call features

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Additional explanations

You may also be interested in this Asterisk feature summary which sometimes provides a slightly less technical description of features. You may find it useful to compare the two sets of explainations as an aid to understanding.

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ADSI On-Screen Menu System :

Alarm Receiver : Receive a alarm on your phone.

Append Message: Append the message to an e-mail.

Blacklists: Screening malicious callers.

Blind Transfer: Blindly transfers a call.

Call Monitoring:

Call Parking: Call park allows you to place a call on hold on an extension other than your own. This is useful for retail stores or factory floors.

Call Queuing: Queuing up the call.

Call Recording: Recording conversations.

Call Retrieval: Paging for the correct person to pick up the call.

Call Snooping:

Call Transfer: Transfering a call to another extension.

Call Waiting: Allows the use of a hook-flash to change between two simultaneous calls.

Calling Cards:

Conference Bridging:

Database Store / Retrieve:

Database Integration:

Dial by Name: Assuming voicemail is set up correctly, Dial by Name allows an outside caller to get 411-like help in finding the extension number of the person they wish to call.

Direct Inward System Access: Allows an outside caller to have full access to PBX functions, which is normally reserved for internal-only access. Common use of DISA is if you have road warriors or home-based workers: they can call into your PBX and make free outbound long distance calls, also appearing to be at your physical location.

Distinctive Ring: The called phone has distinct ring based on the place from where call originated eg., a specific number, internal or extenal calls.

Distributed Universal Number Discovery (DUNDiâ„¢) :

Do Not Disturb: No calls will be connected.

E911: Enchanced 911, important in case of a VoIP solution.

ENUM: Universal number for your VoIP phone.

Fax Transmit and Receive (3rd Party OSS Package) :

Flexible Extension Logic:

Interactive Directory Listing:

Local and Remote Call Agents: People can log on to the PBX system
from any phone using a Login ID, allowing them to receive and respond to calls.

Macros: In configuring the dial plan, the use of macros and pattern matching greatly simplifies identical configuration for hundreds, even thousands, of extensions.

Predictive Dialer: Generally for use in outbound telesales or customer service; predictive dialing optimizes the time that agents spend on the phone by pre-dialing numbers when it is determined that an agent will be coming available.

Privacy:

Open Settlement Protocol (OSP) : OSP is a protocol standard for securely routing and accounting for inter-domain VoIP calls. OSP is not a VoIP protocol, but rather a standard for managing the billable exchange of VoIP sessions between IP networks. OSP is used by wholesale VoIP carriers to establish secure point to point peering between source and destination networks. The details for OSP, officially known as "ETSI TS 101 321 Open Settlement Protocol (OSP) for Inter-Domain pricing, authorization and usage exchange", can be found at www.etsi.org.

Overhead Paging: Sometimes also called intercom, this allows a centrally-located speaker to be "dialed into", for making announcements. Frequently seen in retail stores, also car dealers, factory floors and other non-office type situations.

Protocol Conversion: Can bridge calls between dissimilar systems, for example IAX to SIP, PSTN to MGCP.

Remote Office Support:

Roaming Extensions:

SMS Messaging:

Spell / Say: Can "read" letters and numbers to a caller, for example reading back the current time.

Streaming Media Access: Allows streaming of media such as mp3s directly into the phone system, useful for hold messages.

Supervised Transfer: Similar to blind transfer, allows a person to transfer a call to another extension by first announcing that call to the transfered extension. Useful in situations like "I have Joe Carseller on the phone, do you want to talk to him?"

Talk Detection: There are a few modules which allow various types of noise detection on certain channels; talk detection can be used to trigger an event, for example, play an automated message when somebody says "hello."

Text-to-Speech (via Festival) : Asterisk may read text via the Festival voice synthesis suite. For example, this could be used to read a web page containing the current weather or an email

Three-way Calling: Adding a third party to an ongoing conversation.

Time and Date:

Transcoding: Allows Asterisk to bridge calls that use different audio encodings, for example g711.u to GSM.

Trunking: Logically grouping together multiple phone lines for outbound dialing; typically seen in medium to large deployments. The PBX can be configured to auto-select an available line for outbound dialing rather than the user having to choose which line to dial out on.

VoIP Gateways: Asterisk can act as a bridge between VoIP telephones and the PSTN; additionally, Asterisk can be used to route calls to some third-party VoIP gateways (think Vonage, though I don't believe that is an available option). Check out BroadVoice or Packet8.


Voicemail to email: Asterisk's native voicemail can send an email to the voicemail recipient, and can optionally attach a WAV file of the entire message.

Voicemail Groups:

Web Voicemail Interface: As with most things Asterisk, it is almost trivial to provide a browser-based interface to the system.


Zapateller: Built-in, automated "black hole" for inbound telemarketing calls.


Pease feel free to add as many definitions as possible
Thanks to http://forum.digium.org for their support