Becky IVR, the voice menu from hell ! A small project written during the weekend for fun :)

Inspired by Marc Labreche's Soap Opera Parody 'Le coeur a ses raisons'. Brett attempts to call Becky but reaches her voicemail, and gets lost trying to navigate the very confusing phone menu ;) The original sketch can be viewed on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzJbo1DlJSQ)

This is an attempt at recreating Becky's voicemail menu using free and open source software. The IVR is written using asterisk dialplan. (I've also included a small python script used for spam protection).

As a side note, this project can easily be reused as a comedic example on how to write IVRs using asterisk !

• Asterisk 1.8 or later

Optional, but needed for the spam protection script:

• python 2.6 or later
• python-sqlite

1. Copy files
2. Create the database (if you want to use spam protection)
3. Add the sound prompts
4. Add diaplan to extensions.conf

The files need to be somewhere with read/write permissions for asterisk. By default the script assumes you will copy files in /var/lib/asterisk/becky. Don't forget to change the constants in becky.conf if you put the files somewhere else.

cp -R becky /var/lib/asterisk
chown -R asterisk:asterisk /var/lib/asterisk/becky

Execute the script in the database folder

cd /var/lib/asterisk/becky/database
./createdb.sh

Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, I cannot include the original sound prompts in the project. However, you can make your own ! More details in the README under the sounds directory.

Once you have your prompts, you need to put them somewhere asterisk can find them. A link placed inside asterisk's sounds directory usually does the trick.

ln -s /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/becky /path/to/becky/sounds

WARNING: Currently on ubuntu/debian, paths to custom sound prompts are buggy. A workaround is to place the link directly in /usr/share/asterisk/sounds

Add this line somewhere in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf (the # isn't a comment !)

#include /var/lib/asterisk/becky/dialplan/becky.conf

Then add an extension that redirects towards the IVR

exten => 1000,1,Goto(becky-answer,s,1)

If you want to use the spam protection script, use this line instead

exten => 1000,1,Goto(becky-spam-protect)

Want to make Becky even better ? Feel free to fork and submit a pull request !

Currently, I would be really interested in some freely distributable sound prompts. See the README under the sounds directory for more details.

This project is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more details.