The VICIdial voicemail greeting chooser

Out of the box, a VICIdial voicemail box plays a generic, robotic greeting — the standard Asterisk prompt. That is fine for an internal test box and wrong for anything a customer hears. The fix is the Voicemail Greeting field, which lets you point a box at a specific recorded file so callers hear your wording, your name, and your callback instructions instead of the default.

It is a chooser, not an upload box. You record or upload the greeting once into the audio store, and then each voicemail record picks which file to play. That separation is the whole point — one greeting can serve many boxes, and swapping it is a single dropdown change.

Where the greeting comes from

The file you choose lives in the audio store — the same shared library that holds your hold music, IVR prompts, and other recordings. If you haven't put greetings there yet, start with uploading an audio prompt. Once a file is in the store, it shows up as a selectable option in the Voicemail Greeting dropdown on the box's record.

A couple of things shape which file actually plays cleanly:

• Format. Asterisk is happiest with files it can stream without transcoding, which is why the store cares about G.711 codec and GSM encoding.
• Length. A greeting that runs forty seconds annoys callers; ten to fifteen is plenty.
• Wording. If you record from text, a TTS (text to speech) voice gets you something passable, but a real human recording sounds better on the DID (direct inward dialing) that fronts your main line.

The setting you have to turn on first

There is a gotcha that catches people: the Voicemail Greeting field does nothing until the Allow Voicemail Greeting Chooser flag is enabled in Admin – System Settings. The default for the greeting field itself is blank, which falls back to the generic prompt. So if you set a greeting and callers still hear the robot, the system-level switch is almost certainly off. Turn it on once, system-wide, and every box can then use the chooser.

The decision a box makes when a caller hits voicemail looks like this:

flowchart TD
  A["Caller reaches box"] --> B{"Chooser enabled in System Settings?"}
  B -- No --> C["Play default Asterisk greeting"]
  B -- Yes --> D{"Greeting field set?"}
  D -- No --> C
  D -- Yes --> E["Play chosen file from audio store"]
  E --> F["Caller leaves message"]
  C --> F

A clean order of operations

To avoid the back-and-forth, do it in this order.

1. Record or upload the greeting into the audio store.
2. Enable Allow Voicemail Greeting Chooser in System Settings, once.
3. Open the voicemail record and pick your file in Voicemail Greeting.
4. Dial the box and listen end to end before you trust it.

Because the greeting lives in the store and not on the box, you can also reuse one professional recording across an Ingroup overflow box, a main-line box, and an after-hours box without re-recording anything. For the wider picture of how prompts, greetings, and the store relate, the audio prompts and voicemail overview ties it together, and the companion greeting chooser setting digs into that system-level flag.

All of this assumes you already have a working dialer to configure. If you don't, we hand you a secured VICIdial server in under 40 seconds — see pricing — with the audio store ready for your first greeting upload.