donnelly@decvax.dec.com (Mark Donnelly) (08/11/89)
Here are the comments I received about the Voice Processing System " Watson" Thank you to those who responded. >I was wondering if any one as experiences or comments about Natural >Microsystems product called "Waston". It is a PC based voice processing system >that I was thinking of buying. I bought one, and haven't had time to do as much with it as I'd hoped. (That's "Watson", not "Waston", by the way.) The basic package comes with a menu-based telephone answering machine and phonemail system. You have to spend more money if you want either other applications software or any interface software to call yourself. You don't get any hardware programming info. The software as supplied supports passwords and automatic dial-out forwarding of messages. The hardware works pretty well. Nicely designed except for two things that bugged me: 1) It doesn't hang up and get off the line if you pick up another extension, and there's no way to detect in software that someone local has picked up. 2) No way to deal with multiple phone lines.
aem@ibiza.cs.miami.edu (a.e.mossberg) (08/15/89)
mergvax!donnelly@decvax.dec.com (Mark Donnelly) writes: >>I was wondering if any one as experiences or comments about Natural >>Microsystems product called "Watson". It is a PC based voice processing >>system that I was thinking of buying. Whoops, sorry. I didn't see your original request. I wrote a real estate inquiry service using the Watson system. A month after we had bought the system, they upgraded the software and ROMs on the board. They charged us two hundred dollars to upgrade, though the upgrade was merely bug fixes, serious enough to delay the project. The interface was designed for people who didn't know anything about using a computer, and was very awkward to write a program with. All the advanced features required buying their "application software" or their "developer's package". The board itself was very slow at picking up DTMF and halting outgoing speech. After some inital tests of the system, Watson was put in a closet. We found it to have too many problems to be used robustly in an inquiry service. I liked the idea of Watson. Unfortunately, we found it to be poorly designed and extremely overpriced. ("Well, we only make a small number"-- Less than a month after putting it in a closet, we saw Watson from mail-order houses for less than our "dealer-incentive price") Unless it has significantly changed, I couldn't recommend it. (If I seem vague on some details, this was three and a half years ago..) aem a.e.mossberg - aem@mthvax.cs.miami.edu/aem@umiami.BITNET - Pahayokee Bioregion I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches. - Alice Roosevelt Longworth