12 people, 1 phone message

May 20, 2010 10:15 AM

I'm looking for a way for a dozen people to call the same phone number at the same time and get the same message, which I have as an mp3 or wav file.

A voicemail-style service is fine as long as I can change what the message is and it's allowed to be around 1-2 minutes long and it won't give a busy signal if multiple people are calling at the same time.

Alternatively, it'd be fine if some kind of robot called everyone at once and played the message.

We're in the US.

posted by NoraReed to technology (7 answers total)

A Google Voice number?
posted by idb at 11:02 AM on May 20, 2010

Google Voice would be good for this, but you'd need to hack it a bit to get the mp3 on there.
posted by nitsuj at 11:03 AM on May 20, 2010

Google Voice doesn't really do this on its own, the message would be truncated at 30 seconds I believe. GrandCentral used to support arbitrary length mp3 ringbacks which was great, but apparently the copyright police shut that down. So, your stuck with running your own PBX, which is what is suggested in the link that nitsuj posted, or using a PBX service from someone else. An Asterisk server would work just fine, but it's probably an excessive amount of work for a one-off project. So, you're left with hosted PBX services. Google "virtual pbx service" for providers. Most of them have free 15 or 30 day trials. If you wanted to go the robocall route, same things apply, you could do with with Asterisk but setup is painful, hosted services can be located by Googling for "automated calling service."
posted by signalnine at 11:40 AM on May 20, 2010

s/your/you're *shame*
posted by signalnine at 11:54 AM on May 20, 2010

Yet again, I recommend VoIP.ms Purchasing the number will cost about $5 per month, slightly more for additional channels (how many people can call the number without hearing a busy signal). You'll be charged per-minute at a very low rate. It's all an Asterisk server anyway, so you can do all kinds of crazy stuff, but for your purposes you can definitely load an MP3 and have it play automatically.
posted by odinsdream at 12:29 PM on May 20, 2010

You could also look at Twilio - easy to get what you want set up, very inexpensive, you can do it outbound so the people get called at a particular time.

No affiliation, though they did send me a t-shirt and gave me some free credit.
posted by lowlife at 7:00 PM on May 20, 2010

Tropo.com is like Geocities for phone systems. It's free for limited use. I built a "click to call" system in about 30 minutes and a system where the caller can hear 9 different audio clips in about an hour. I am not a programmer. There is good documentation and the admins are really helpful. Since you're only looking to play out an audio file and not get any kind of input, what you want to do should be really easy.
posted by reddot at 8:07 AM on May 22, 2010