This tutorial is based off things we did in Part 1, so if you haven't done that yet you'll want to check it out.
In our first tutorial we learned how to create a basic Hello World project that greets our caller and hangs up. In a real world scenario, this isn't very useful so now we'll learn how to prompt a caller and handle their response.
Step 1: Opening an Existing Project
From here we'll select Open an Existing Project, select our Hello World project and click Open Project. This brings us back to our familiar Call Flow diagram.
Step 2: Add a Step
Since we want to do a little more than play an announcement to our caller we'll need to add a new step. On the left under Project Menu let's click on Create a Step.
This will bring us to a window giving us a list of possible step types to employ. We want to ask our caller a question and get their response to process later so we'll select Choice.
Let's fill in our step name first. Let's call it Greatest Band. Under Prompt Items you'll see a few different options. New Audio allows us to add a new prompt into our step. Existing Audio allows us to reuse any previously created TTS or audio file prompts instead of retyping them. Add Data allows us to insert a Data Variable into the prompt. We haven't created any of our own data variables just yet, so the only options we should see here are session variables: ANI - the caller ID, DNIS - the number they called, NOW - the current DATE and CALLID - the session ID of the current call. For the purposes of this tutorial, we won't be using any of these, but feel free to insert them into your prompts to see how it works.
Alright, now that we're done playing around with session variables, we need to create a prompt to ask our callers our question. Click on New Audio and we should get a prompt like this. Again, we have the option of inserting text or an audio file to be rendered to our callers. For now, we'll just ask a simple question with TTS. Once we're done typing in our prompt, click OK.
We'll need to add in some choices for our caller so click on Caller Choices and click Add. In the Edit Response window, let's input our first choice for greatest band of all time. Here we can also set a Data Variable that will be accessible throughout the rest of our project. Under 'Set result to:' type in the value you want to assign to the data variable for this particular response.
Once we've filled in our values, we'll need to set a Destination step. You can select an existing step from the pull down or by pressing the + we can create a new step that will automatically be assigned to our Destination slot. The only steps we have thus far are Start and Hangup. We definitely don't want to send our caller in an infinite loop, so Startup is out, and we don't want to hangup on our caller after they've answered our question, that's just rude. Instead, we'll want to create a new step so go ahead click the +.
Here we'll name our new step and select a type. We simply want to inform the caller that they've made the right decision so we'll go with Prompt and click Save.
Now we need to add a little content into our new Step and set its destination. Move up to the Edit Step pulldown and select our new step.
We already know how to Add Audio to a Prompt step so let's go ahead and do that. If you click Add Data now, you'll notice we now have a new option for our own Data Variable from the previous step. Let's go ahead and insert it so we can repeat it back to our caller.
Now all that's left to do is select our destination. Let's go ahead and select Hangup and click Save. Now that we're back to our Call Flow diagram, let's click on Start and verify our destination is set to Greatest Band and click Save.
Step 3: Publish
Our project is now complete, so let's click Publish.
Our project is now ready for calls. If we return to the Management Console to look at our Hello World project, we now have two options in the version drop down menu, version 1 and version 2. If you've selected Use Latest Version, you'll see that version 2 is already selected. If not, well, we want callers to reach our new and improved version so select Hello World Version 2 and click Update. Our project is mapped and ready for calls, so go ahead and give it a try.
What we learned:
How to create steps to prompt a caller for input in our Designer project
How to invoke text-to-speech in our Designer project
How to publish new versions of our project
How to integrate Data Variables into our project
Ready for the next step? In the next tutorial, we'll show you how to integrate a server side to create a truly useful Designer project.
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