3CX "Extension Not Found" in Dial by Name

[jessy.paconnect]

I know the rules for this and what you have to do. I am not here to talk about how to do it. I am here to ask why its like this?

We love so much about 3CX and the features and stability it gives us and our clients, but this is honestly one of my biggest annoyances about the system as a whole. Is there a way to just enable everyone to have their extensions activated?

My main question is since its done by letter dial, clearly the name doesn't actually mean or do anything, it could simply be a robotic voice in place of it when its not recorded. Just looking for some clarity and if it could be changed in the future!

Thanks!

 

[Callinectes]

I agree. We changed to 3CX from Fonality systems and they would read the name if a recording didn't exist. Instead of relying on a recording being present there was a simple on/off for "in dial by name directory."

 

[NickD_3CX]

So the reason why each Extension needs to record a Self-Identification Prompt in order to be eligible for Dial By Name, is in case the 3 numeric digits you enter cause the system to be able to find more than one matching names in the combination of digits they correspond to.

Sure, you could think that by the time we have text-to-speech, we could replace it with that, unfortunately though text-to-speech requires that you set the language that you are writing in, and that wouldn't be very convenient if you have names of users that are from different countries on the same PBX (like us at 3CX).

Yes, I understand it my be a bit of a pain to configure it, but there needs to be some way to choose between multiple matches when that happens.

 

[SweetAction]

VOIPTools has a tool to auto-generate self_id's but you could also build it yourself if so inclined....

On schedule check every extension and look for the self ID file
-Make list of extensions missing it
-Get name of extension
-Run through your preferred speech to text tool
-Insert completed file into system

3CX has stayed away from speech to text so far and I would suspect they have no interest in doing text to speech either. They've outsourced to Azure/Google's engines and I would suspect that here they would do the same. If they built in an "auto name generate" function I would recommend Amazon Polly, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

 

[VoIPTools]

Here is a link to our tool. As @SweetAction has described, this is a set-and-forget tool. It automatically looks once a day for missing "self IDs" and auto-generates the necessary .wav file in the proper format and places the files in the correct location. You don't have to do anything. We do use Polly, and the results are far better than I expected. I suspect they have a large database of names because the audio is just too good. You can run an update as needed too.