To build a SQLphone telephone answering system, you must design a flowchart. A flowchart consists of three basic elements:
You can add as many memories, prompts and boxes to your flowchart as you wish. The names of all your memories, prompts and boxes must be unique (names are not case sensitive).
Memories are used to store:
- Digits entered by a caller over the phone
- Values retrieved from the database via SQL
- Values retrieved from a DLL call
SQLphone can speak any memory value to a caller. For programmers: Memories are untyped variables, they can store any kind of data (integer, floating point, string, time, date).
Prompts are wave files. They are pre-recorded voice messages, which can be played to a caller over the phone. Prompts can be:
- Complete messages ("hello, welcome to our system")
- Numbers, days of the week, etc. which can be played in sequence to speak numeric/date/time values.
Boxes are the bricks used to build a flowchart. There are seven kinds of boxes:
- Play - speak a sequence of prompts and/or memory values to a caller
- Digits - collect digits pressed by a caller on their phone keypad
- Record - record a message spoken by a caller
- SQL - execute a SQL statement to store or retrieve data from a database
- Email - send an email
- DLL - call any function exported by a dynamic link library (DLL)
- Dial - dial a number to make an outgoing call