mfi@serc.cis.ufl.edu (Mark Interrante) (02/28/91)
I ran across a reference to this in the NeXT users journal (I was very
impressed with NUJ!!) and thought others might find it useful.
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`At The Beep'
A NeXT-Based Answering Machine System
At The Beep is a NeXT-computer based telephone answering machine system.
It contains all of the features of sophisticated standalone answering machines
and adds extended features only possible with an attached computer. At The
Beep takes full advantage of the NeXT graphical user interface and sound
features.
Software Engineering Solutions has one current product in this line, the
Personal System, and plans to add two more in the future with a simple
software upgrade. All three systems will use the same telephone interface
unit.
This system is shipping now, but without the Remote Control features.
All current customers will receive a free upgrade including the Remote Control
feature when it is complete. Pricing has been set at $695.00 for the software
and hardware package.
Demonstration System:
---------------------
Feel free to call the demonstration answering machine system at
(512)343-2828 and leave a message, stating you name, company and preferred
form of communication: phone, postal mail address or electronic mail address.
Software Engineering Solutions,
11160 Jollyville Road, Austin, Texas 78759
(512)343-2828
mbrown@math.utexas.edu
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I have no connection with SES I just heard about them and thought I
would pass the info along.
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Mark Interrante Software Engineering Research Center
mfi@beach.cis.ufl.edu CIS Department, University of Florida 32611
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Quote from a west Texas farmer "status quo is Latin for the mess we're in."barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) (03/03/91)
In article <27184@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> mfi@serc.cis.ufl.edu () writes: > `At The Beep' > A NeXT-Based Answering Machine System > > At The Beep is a NeXT-computer based telephone answering machine system. Oh glorious day! Finally I can have the digital answering machine I've always wanted, without the huge RAM costs (a useful standalone DAM would need at least $800 worth of ram, which is why you don't see them). Way to go Software Engineering Solutions! Its a good first step, but here's what I'd really like to see: A full suite of neXTStep based ``phone utilities'', integrated into one hardware/software package: I'd like: (1) 9600 baud Fax (2) 9600 baud modem (3) digital answering machine (4) Oh, and all black, of course! (5) And throw in a stylish black phone, too. (But keep it modular, so each capability can be added separately). Also, try and keep the price around $1000 (academic, at least). >Demonstration System: >--------------------- > Feel free to call the demonstration answering machine system at >(512)343-2828 and leave a message, stating you name, company and preferred >form of communication: phone, postal mail address or electronic mail address. > >Software Engineering Solutions, >11160 Jollyville Road, Austin, Texas 78759 >(512)343-2828 >mbrown@math.utexas.edu I gave them a call. Very nifty. You can order via email a software demo; I'm waiting for mine now. -- Barry Merriman UCLA Dept. of Math UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)
waltrip@capd.jhuapl.edu (03/05/91)
In article <1991Mar3.054443.3135@math.ucla.edu>, barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes: [...] > I'd like: > > (1) 9600 baud Fax > (2) 9600 baud modem > (3) digital answering machine > (4) Oh, and all black, of course! > (5) And throw in a stylish black phone, too. Me, too. c.f.waltrip Internet: <waltrip@capsrv.jhuapl.edu> Opinions expressed are my own.
sahayman@porbeagle.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) (03/05/91)
>I'd like: > >(1) 9600 baud Fax >(2) 9600 baud modem >(3) digital answering machine And a "touch-tone shell" feature. A way to "log in" to your machine using a touch tone phone, and have the beeps you enter on the phone be translated to ASCII, with some sort of voice reading characters back to you. So you could read your email, or run 'rn' or whatever over a phone. I think it'd be cool.
new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) (03/05/91)
In article <1991Mar4.161518.28630@news.cs.indiana.edu> sahayman@porbeagle.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) writes: >And a "touch-tone shell" feature. [...] >have the beeps you enter >on the phone be translated to ASCII You must be kidding. You want a machine that can I/O CD quality sound, and you want to resort to a 12-character alphabet? Why not just program it for voice recognition? Speaking of which, is there such a program available for the NeXT already (a voice-command recognition program, that is)? No matter how primitive, I would like to hear about it. If it can be done for $100 on the Amiga, I can't imagine it would be difficult to do at least as well on a NeXT. I have visions of computerizing my entire house... -- Darren -- --- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware --- ----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, Formal Description Techniques (esp. Estelle), Coffee, Amigas ----- =+=+=+ Let GROPE be an N-tuple where ... +=+=+=
sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) (03/05/91)
>>And a "touch-tone shell" feature. [...] >>have the beeps you enter >on the phone be translated to ASCII > >You must be kidding. You want a machine that can I/O CD quality sound, >and you want to resort to a 12-character alphabet? No, I'm not really kidding. People have done this sort of thing before - someone from AT&T demonstrated a Touch-Tone Shell at Usenix once. He phoned up his workstation, and it said "Login:" and he typed some sequence of touch-tone keys that corresponded to his userid an password, and typed "M" "A" "I" "L" on the phone, and started reading his mail , etc etc. You need to set up a mapping between the 12 touch-tone keys and ASCII, of course, in order to be able to get to all the various characters. But it can be done. I don't necessarily want to be able to log in and have my mail read to me, but if you had something that could do this, you would have the beginnings of a voice-mail toolkit. It would be fun to play with. Gimme something that can turn the touch-tone sound for '4' into a '4' coming in the serial port, and I could have a lot of fun with that. You could write simple Unix shell scripts to do voice mail stuff. suppose you had some sound files sitting around with useful phrases in them. and a 'phonesound' command that sent a sound file out the phone line, and a 'get-DTMF-character' command that read a touch-tone from the phone line and converted it to the appropriate ASCII digit. ... #!/bin/sh # says "Hello, welcome to Steve's voice response system" # and sends it down the phone line phonesound welcome.snd while :; do # says "What do you want to do now?" phonesound what-now.snd # read a tone from the phone line x=`get-DTMF-character` case "$x" in "0") # says "OK, I am now rebooting the machine" phonesound ok-reboot.snd reboot ;; "1") # Says "What time do you want a wake-up call for" phonesound what-time-wakeup.snd time=`get-DTMF-string` at $time phone-user-wake-him-up ;; esac done etc etc. It'd be fun. Who can direct me to a device that converts DTMF to Ascii? There must be one somewhere. ..Steve -- Steve Hayman Workstation Manager Computer Science Department Indiana U. sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (812) 855-6984 NeXT Mail: sahayman@spurge.bloomington.in.us
geoff@ITcorp.com (Geoff Kuenning) (03/08/91)
In article <1991Mar4.195639.6460@news.cs.indiana.edu> sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) writes: > >You must be kidding. You want a machine that can I/O CD quality sound, > >and you want to resort to a 12-character alphabet? Just for all you youths out there, this is an old idea. The University of Michigan's MTS system had an IBM voice-response unit about 20 years ago. Since they didn't really have anything useful to do with it, some clever programmer wrote a simple driver that translated beeps into the 48 or so characters MTS needed (lowercase? what's that?). They used the obvious mapping -- press the key with the letter you want, then 1, 2, or 3 to indicate which of the three. I forget what they did about the missing letters and the special characters, but I know they handled them because logging on required a dollar sign. It was fun to play with, but what a major pain to actually do anything! If you're really going to make a touch-tone interface to your NeXT, I'd strongly recommend the modern style of menus, with escapes only when absolutely necessary. Me, I type fast, and I'll stick with my nice black keyboard, thank you. -- Geoff Kuenning geoff@ITcorp.com uunet!desint!geoff