Funny Asterisk Sounds

The open-source Asterisk PBX is undeniably a revolution, not only in the badly-needed way that it brings telecommunications into the open source world, but also in the way that it is a bold new realm for geek humor!

You see, the Asterisk project includes a huge number of professionally recorded sounds and prompts for uses to write into their phone system. These include sayings like "Please hold while I transfer your call" and so forth. Buried within these typical recordings however are a bunch of prompts that are a little less serious. What makes them especially funny is that they are still spoken by the professional voice actor hired by Digium.

I've included a small sampling of these sounds below. They are in .gsm format, which is basically a kind of .wav file made especially for dictation. Your audio player should probably have no problems with it. You may need to download the linked file to your computer to play it.

If you want to listen to more sounds (there are a ton!), just check-out the asterisk-sounds module from the Asterisk CVS server:

	export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@cvs.digium.com:/usr/cvsroot 
	cvs login
	(anoncvs is the password) 
	cvs checkout asterisk-sounds

Ok, here we go:

• The O'Reilly Asterisk book includes an example where you forward telemarketers to this.
• No surprise finding this sound.
• In addition to the traditional "are you still there?" inactivity prompt, there is one that is a bit more aggravated.
• If you want to spice up your away message, you can use this or this.
• This is one of my favorites. Do you know what it means?
• A good sound to include for the extensions of terminated employees might be this one. Perhaps then followed by this.
• Every auto-attendant should include this option, which will take you to this.
• "The Jedi Extension Trick"
• If someone spazzes out on their phone keypad, maybe have this sound play.
• My second favorite. Gaming geeks will know.
• Finally, be sure and use this helpful error message if something goes wrong with your setup.