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GettingStarted
This wiki page will guide you through setting up a SIP number to answer and make calls with a simple workflow.
- Point your browser to http://verboice.instedd.org
- Click on the "#" link at the bottom
- Enter your email, a password and a password confirmation
- Hit the # button
Video: How to setup an account
A project in Verboice is your starting point. A project contains the call flows that Verboice will execute when calling or being called, the audio resources, schedules for calling users, phone book and integrations.
We will create a simple project which, when called, will say "Hello World".
- In Verboice, click on the "Projects" tab
- Click "Create a new Project"
- Enter "Hello World" as the name of the project, leave Status Callback empty, and hit save
Once on the project page, choose Call Flows, Add a new call flow, and choose to design your app in Verboice. This will give you the option to Go to Designer, where you will spend most of your time, tuning the actions you want Verboice to execute.
At the designer, choose to add a new Play step. This basic building block will play an audio file or recording to the user. Select the newly added play step, give it a name, and configure the message to play.
Every message will be saved as a resource, which you can later re-use. Give this new message a name, and choose whether to upload an audio file, record a message in your browser, or simply use text-to-speech to write a message and have Verboice automatically read it to the user.
You will later want to come back to this page to set up more complex interactions (there are over 15 different step kinds), but for now, hit save and return to the Project page.
Video: How to create a Hello World application
Video: How to create a Health Tips application
Channels are the way Verboice has of communicating with the users. You can make use different providers, such as Twilio, Callcentric or Skype, or any other SIP-based aggregator. Note that channels can be shared between Projects, so you can have multiple projects in Verboice use the same channel for making calls; however, a channel must have one call flow defined for answering incoming calls.
For now, we will be using a SIP account from http://sip2sip.info, so if you don't have a SIP address there you will need to go there and get one. SIP2SIP will allow you to perform calls between different accounts for free.
Next we will tell Verboice to use this SIP address in your account:
- In Verboice, click on the "Channels" tab
- Enter a name for the channel, for example: mysip2sip
- Select the "Hello World" application from the dropdown: this tells Verboice to perform the workflow of that application when a call is received or made from this channel.
- Enter your sip2sip username
- Enter your sip2sip password
- Hit the "Create channel" button
Video: setting Skype as a Verboice Channel
Now we will call that sip2sip number to hear "Hello World".
First we need another number from which to call, so you can go ahead and create another sip2sip account. In the following instructions we will call Verboice Number to the sip2sip number you configured in Verboice and User Number to the sip2sip number from which you will make the call.
Depending on your operating system we'll guide you through downloading a software to configure that second phone number and call the first one. We will be using Blink, but you can use any other SIP client you like, such as Telephone.
- Download Blink from http://icanblink.com/
- Configure the User Number as described in http://icanblink.com/help.phtml#sip_accounts
- In the field where it says "Search Contacts or Enter Address" enter the Verboice Number and press Enter or click on the green telephone icon.
- You should hear the "Hello World"' audio.
Now we will make the Verboice Number call the User number.
From your project's Overview page, you can Enqueue new calls from Verboice. Choose the call flow you have just created, your sip2sip channel, and enter one or more phone numbers which will be called one by one by Verboice. Your SIP software should then ring and when picking up the call you should hear "Hello World".
To programatically enqueue a call, you can also issue an authenticated GET request to
http://verboice.instedd.org/api/call?channel={ChannelName}&address={UserNumber}, replacing {ChannelName} with the name you chose for the sip2sip channel, and {UserNumber} with the User Number.
There are many ways to interact with external applications.
The simplest is for an external application to expose some web service calls that expose the data needed by your call flow, and accept inputs as results. You can then add those web services into Verboice to retrieve data or send it to your application throughout the call flow. To do this, you must expose some information that will help Verboice find these web services and map the data it has to what they need.
See External Services for more information.
Back when we created the Hello World application we chose the "Use a custom flow" mode. You can also choose "Use a callback URL". Selecting this option will tell Verboice to issue an HTTP POST request to an URL, having that request's reply tell Verboice what to do next, similar to how Twilio works.