Hooking Up Dialogic Voice Card To Phones

[gkmurrieta]

I bought a used Dialogic D/41ESC to provide a more sophisticated answering machine for our home. Now I realize that I don't know what I'm doing.

 

Without any Dialogic station interface cards, how do I hook up our phones? We have multiple phones on a single line. We need to be able to answer the phone before the VG/answering machine does. We also would like to use the phones to retrieve recorded messages.

 

I don't expect to have PBX-like functionality -- let's pretend we have just 1 telephone.

 

I know I will plug the line from the CO into one of the Dialogic ports. Do I plug the telephone into one of the other Dialogic ports?

 

Sorry for the very basic questions. I read the manual & everything. This forum looks quite new, so I couldn't find an answer here, either.

 

Thanks.

GK

[SupportTeam]

D/41ESC has 4 analog inputs - and as you observed you cannot plug telephone extensions into it.

 

If you want VoiceGuide to answer unanswered calls then you can connect it in parallel with your phone line - from your phone socket in the wall have the cable split into the phone handset and into D41ESC, then set VoiceGuide to answer after a larger number of Rings - say 8 or 10...

 

You would not be able to retriveve messages using your phone using this approach - if you want to do that you'll need a PBX...

[Guest Grinch]

How do people not know what they buy? You bought a 4 port card, and don't know how it works, it has 4 ports, 4 analog lines. I don;t think this would even be explain in the owners manual? If it did that would be wierd, I don't think that a manufacturer actually would tell you how to set that up. Using a answering machine is the same as using CT technology, except that the computer answers the phone isntead of an answering machine. Granted some or most answering machines have a "phone" port to plug your phone into it, but if it didn;t you would use a splitter. this applies to using a computer and voice software as well.

 

Again I ask, How could you not know this? Considering that you went out looking for software to do this and bought a 4 port dialogic card, you must have SOME knowledge of how this stuff works, especially in this simplicity, but yet you don't know how to hook up a phone and a voice card together?

 

I think I need a beer!

[greiner]

The easiest way the think about the card, is that you have 4 virtual phones on the card. So you can't plug a phone directly to another phone with a plain phone cable. But you can plug a phone into the CO jacks on your wall. So you plug the card into the CO jack on the wall or PBX extension, if it supports analog lines like the AT&T Partner ACS series.

 

 

Add the card into an available ISA slot, download the Dialogic drivers from www.dialogic.com (Redirects you to Intel now, they bought them). If you are not to sure about the install, select Full, you will get alot of crap. But you will also get what you need. Then from the control panel make sure to add the Dialogic as a Telephony device, and add the Wave multimedia driver. Then run Voiceguide, if it works you will see 4 analog lines that you can use. This is of course all laid out in the help file that comes with voiceguide.

[gkmurrieta]

OK, thanks for the help. A few more questions.

 

Assuming I connect an incoming line to both the voice card and a phone in parallel, after the voice card answers a call, can it detect when the phone goes off-hook? Or at least when keys are pressed? This would be important for any kind of call-screening, and to stop message recording when the conversation begins. Does VoiceGuide support this? I see call-screening listed as a feature, but didn't see the details.

 

Going a little further, if the phone is off-hook and the voice card is on-hook, can the card detect DTMF originating from the phone? It would seem likely that the voice card could detect digits when both are off-hook. Does VoiceGuide support capturing the DTMF to log outgoing calls?

 

OK, getting way out there... ADSI phones can receive messages when on-hook. Could the voice card send ADSI data to the phone when the phone is on-hook?

 

Thanks.

[SupportTeam]

Can VoiceGuide detect when the local phone goes off-hook

 

No. You will need to either:

 

1. Press 'hangup' button on VoiceGuide after picking up the phone handset.

 

2. set up a script in such a way that pressing a certain key will result in script ending and hanging up the call - thee after picking up the handset attached to the same line just press that key - VoiceGuide will hear it and hang up, allowing you to continue the call...

 

 

Can voice card detect DTMF when it is on-hook?

 

No. When it is on-hook it cannot hear what anybody else is doing on the line, it needs to go off-hook first - sort of like you needing to pick up the handset before you can hear what is being said on the line...

 

 

Could the voice card send ADSI data to the phone when the phone is on-hook?

 

Quite possibly - most of such messages are sent using DTMF tones - if you can find out what DTMF tones VoiceGuide needs to sent to the PBX or to phone directly for various messages then you can use the "Send Pager Message" module to send these DTMF tones....

The "Send Pager Message" module basically tells VoiceGuide to (when it has a free line) pick up the handset, dial the DTMF tones in the "Telephone number" field, wait a little, and then dial the DTMF tones in the "Pager message" field