Using phrases with IVRs

You may have noticed the greet-long and greet-short option in the examples use "phrase:demo_ivr_main_menu" as opposed to a specific sound filename and path. IVRs allow you to specify sound files using the phrase and text-to-speech macros. This is useful for several reasons, most notably the ability to chain together multiple sounds into one "phrase" and the ability to have different languages presented to the caller, based on the caller's information.

Calling Phrase Macros

Phrase Macros can be called from the Dialplan, from an IVR, or from Dialplan script. (The latter will be covered in the next chapter.) Phrase Macros can be used virtually anywhere that a sound filename can be used. (Phrase Macros are used only for playback purposes, so they cannot be used when specifying a filename for a recording operation.) We have already seen examples of using phrases in our XML IVR configuration files. Following are a few examples of using Phrase Macros from the Dialplan:

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