cs313s03@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (.) (12/24/88)
In article <66184@ti-csl.CSNET> holland@m2.UUCP (Fred Hollander) writes: |>> There is a new product for the Mac, called "Teleflex". |>> It let's your Mac speak, dial the phone, and answer your |>> telephone calls, issue Voice Mail and turn on your coffee pot. | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |...I don't even drink coffee :) | | Fred Hollander Hi Fred! Ok, perhaps I worded that a little too facetiously there. :-) The idea is that it can do remote device control. How about this instead: o Have the Teleflex Mac in your Machine Room attached to an emergency telephone and a halon system. If there is a fire in your computer room so that people cannot enter safely, you could call your Teleflex equipped Macintosh from a telephone in a different building. Via touchtones you could instruct your Macintosh to activate the Halon system to extinguish the fire (hopefully before it got the mac!) then you could have it automatically call the Fire Department and (in digitized human voice) have it report the fire including the location and an alternate number to call where a human could confirm the emergency and provide furthur instructions. o Equip your Mac at home with a Teleflex. Program it to turn your central heating on 1 hour before you rise in the morning so that your house is nice and comfortable when you wake up. Have the timer set so that it turns your heater off after you've left for work for the day so you don't waste money heating the house when no one is home. Then the timer will turn on the heat again before you are due to arrive home. If you happen to stay late, you can telephone home and instruct it to delay turning on your heater and instead tell it to have the lights on your porch and walkway lit for you when you arrive home after dark. In rough neighborhoods it might also offer safety. If you suspect an intruder is in your house, you can call from a neighbors phone and listen to what is happening in the area surrounding the Teleflex equipped Mac. Using your touch-tone phone, you could instruct it to play a digitized voice message out the Mac's speaker to cause the Burglar to flee. ("Boo!") haha :-) o You might find similar uses in controlling laboratory equipment or scientific instruments, electronic gear, devices in hostile environments (nuclear or medical labs) or something like that. Better? :-) NOTE: I just thought of these scenarios off the top of my head. Of course there might be better ways of doing these things, I just wanted to say that it doesn't only turn on Coffee Pots :-). Despite these neat abilities, this is not really what the Teleflex thing's strength is. In fact, the remote control stuff is just an option that you can use if you want to. You need to get some extra stuff like the little control module boxes that you plug your gear into at the outlet (~$10) which receive the instructions from the Mac. GE makes 'em and you can also pick them up at Radio Shack or from DAK or wherever... You can do other stuff with it as well. Like use it as a business voice mail system. If a customer calls, it could answer the phone and say hello, then tell the person to type a key on their phone depending on who they want to speak to ("Type 1 for tech support, 2 for sales, F-R-E-D, to speak to Fred." or whatever...) F-R-E-D turns out to be 3-7-3-3 on the phone. Then it could try your extension to see if you're in. If not, it can say "Sorry, Fred's not in at the moment, if you'd like to leave a message for him, press 1. Or if you'd like to speak to someone else, press 2." If your friend did leave a message, you could have the thing automatically place an outgoing call to a number you entered previously (home, main office, or wherever) and announce over the phone that you had received a msg. You could then tell it to play the msg to you over the phone. Of course you could simply call in periodically and check to see if you got any messages. Another nice thing though, is if the message was something of interest to your colleague "BILL", you could send a copy of the voice msg to Bill since it is stored as a digitized sound file. If you wanted Bill to hear the part about the meeting being cancelled but not the part about your Mother-in-Law, you can edit that part out before you send it. You can cut and paste and edit pieces of sound files together if you wanted to. It accepts e-mail (data) as well as voice. Via modem or over your network. And it works ok under MultiFinder. Check out the note in comp.newprod if yours is still in there and hasn't gone away yet. Otherwise you'll have to call the (808) 955-2758 number to find out anything else about it. By the way... Why don't you like coffee?? :-)
mat65@tukki.jyu.fi (12/26/88)
In article <2886@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> cs313s03@uhccux.UUCP (.) writes: > You can do other stuff with it as well. Like use it as > a business voice mail system. If a customer calls, it > could answer the phone and say hello, then tell the person > to type a key on their phone depending on who they want > to speak to ("Type 1 for tech support, 2 for sales, > F-R-E-D, to speak to Fred." or whatever...) F-R-E-D > turns out to be 3-7-3-3 on the phone. Then it could > try your extension to see if you're in. If not, it > can say "Sorry, Fred's not in at the moment, if you'd > like to leave a message for him, press 1. Or if you'd > like to speak to someone else, press 2." No. Mercy, NO. I have unfortunately been forced to use systems like this. Have you ever spent time punching touch tones overseas for some moronic menu system at $4 per minute (they did have some local radio station playing in- between the call transfers and "please-wait-a-little"'s, so it wasn't a total loss :-) ? I ended up waiting around 15 minutes online, and the first human I spoke to seemed to consider me some kind of a nontechical wimp when I told her I didn't think it's a good idea to make people wait like that, without even letting them tell someone what their business is all about. What if I only would have wanted to order their latest catalogue ? They would DEFINITELY have been losers on that. The thing is, systems like this tend to become some kind of replacements for customer support and technical assistance, and no-one even ever tells them if everyone is out for coffee... Otto J. Makela (with poetic license to kill), University of Jyvaskyla InterNet: makela_otto_@jylk.jyu.fi, BitNet: MAKELA_OTTO_@FINJYU.BITNET BBS: +358 41 211 562 (V.22bis/V.22/V.21, 24h/d) Voice phone: +358 41 613 847 Mail: Kauppakatu 1 B 18, SF-40100 Jyvaskyla, Finland, EUROPE
cs313s03@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (.) (12/29/88)
In article<18460@santra.UUCP> makela_otto_@jylk.jyu.fi (Otto J. Makela) writes: | | No. Mercy, NO.... You're absolutely right that you shouldn't have to wait to get the information you need while calling overseas. I've had to wait on hold long distance while waiting for a tech support person to become available. Obviously these folks can't afford enough staff. Then when someone finally comes on the line, it's the wrong dept or something and they tell me I should speak to another person. So that means waiting on hold some more. Couldn't I just leave a message telling what I want and have the correct person call me back? (that way it's *their* phone bill, not mine.) So after I get done thoroughly explaining my question and giving my contact information, invariably the message gets distilled down to just name and return phone number so when the correct person calls me back, s)he has no idea what I called about in the first place. I wish I could just leave the full message in my own words so the correct person could listen to it and get all the information. Sometimes I don't even need to wait on hold to talk to a person. If I just want them to send some product info or (the example you gave) to order a catalog, all I want to do is leave my name and address and tell them to send it. It's also a drag when there's no answer. Especially for us because we're in a different time zone. By the time our business hours commence, others are nearly closed for the day. It would be nice if I could call 24 hours a day, but no one wants to hire staff to stay and answer questions or take product orders 'round the clock. In your case, it seems like most of the waiting was for the *person* to come around. The telephone system was in fact available and already tending to your call. If they had their telephone switching system programmed correctly you should've been able to leave a message for them to call *you* back. (Their phone bill, not yours.) Machine don't sleep so they're available 24 hours a day. (Try convincing your staff they should stay till midnight and answer the phones :-). I can reach it and get information even if their offices are closed but it is still during business hours in my time zone. I like it because I can leave a message in my own voice explaining my whole question or what product I want to order and they will call *me* back when their office opens the following day.