cjm@hirst1.UUCP (C. J. Marshall) (12/14/83)
Can Anyone Help?
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I am a human factors engineer based in London, England and
recently I have become involved in the design of a Voice Store
And Forward System (VSAF). Basically, this is an "add on" to
a private automated branch exchange allowing companies to
give their staff and others access to mailboxes where they
can create, store, leave, direct etc. voice messages. Messages
are created and received over the telephone and are stored by
digital encoding of the users voice. System messages (which
guide the user) are synthesised from digital recordings. User
control is via a telephone keypad attached to a multifrequency
phone using the numbers 0-9 and the * and # characters. I
believe that IBM, ROLM, ITT and others have similar systems
already operational and I hope some of you may have used them.
My problem is that in the U.K. no one has any experience with
such systems and no human factors work is available.
Consequently, without costly experimentation, I can't answer
some of my clients questions. Perhaps readers of Cognitive
Engineering may be able to help.
The main questions are simple and general and concern user
behaviour.
1) Do users of voice store and forward systems tend to
save voice messages or not? i.e. Is there a need for
the system to provide large storage facilities for
messages the user has already heard but wants to keep,
bearing in mind that this could be costly on system
performance and memory?
2) Types of messages: In general, are messages long or
short, formal or informal, and if messages are long,
is there a need to be able to edit voice messages,
once they have been created, before they are sent?
What kind of information is passed?
3) Voice variables: What kind of voice should the system
have - male or female, word rate (words per minute)
etc.
If anyone has anything useful to say on any of these points I
would be very grateful to hear from you and I would summerise for
cog-eng readers if it looks interesting. Alternatively, if you
know of any human factors work on VSAF or similarly telephone
announcement messages which is generally available, and addresses
such questions, please let me have the reference(s).
thanks in advance.
..!..!ukc!hirst1!cjm