Interacting with the caller without unnecessary personnel involved is an age-old telecommunications industry specialty.

Automated Attendants and Interactive Voice Response systems are two of the most important and popular services almost any organization requires for its communication platform.

Be it a simple call dispatcher, as in an Automated Attendant that routes a call, "press 1 for sales, press 2 for support", or a complex IVR that gathers proof of caller identity and then queries a database for their bank balance status, FreeSWITCH can serve it.

But what about the messages that will be read to the caller? Are we going to record every possible phrase the customer will hear?

Nope, FreeSWITCH has the "phrase" construct, a flexible mechanism to compose arbitrary phrases from short sound files, which are combined in real time, dynamically, as needed. And then, yes, there is text-to-speech (TTS) too!