I have a requirement that our application be able to play a simple audio announcement on top of a given call when the agent asks. From a UI point of view this is done when the agent pushes a button to play the announcement. From a JTAPI point of view I see a couple ways to do this but Im looking for feedback on which would work best.

1) Use call.conference to add a VDN which plays the announcement:

This is what I tried first but it has the side effect of triggering hold music since the original call has to be on hold in order to make the connection to the VDN, also I was getting an error that there "was no held connection found" when I tried to use a single terminal. This option created a bad user experience and we would really like to avoid it.


2) Use addParty to perform a single step conference with a VDN:

Turns out this isnt possible to do with a VDN


Any other suggestions? I would prefer the customer never hear hold music or have to wait too long for the announcement to start.

I believe you can directly dial the announcement extension, and CM will play the announcement into the current call. You can do a single step conference to add the announcement station to the call. I have never tried this myself, so I can't really provide more details, you should check the CM documentation to verify this.