QUICK START GUIDE & FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS RELEASE 2 TM VOICENT GATEWAY TM VOICENT AUTOREMINDER VOICENT BROADCASTBYPHONE TM This document guides you through installing and configuring the software applications for Voicent automated telephone notification system. Voicent AutoReminder is a powerful appointment scheduler with automatic phone reminders. Voicent BroadcastByPhone is aneasy-to-use telephone message delivering system.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC TABLE OF CONTENT INSTALLATION I. System requirements II. Install Voicent software products III. Install your modem and connect it to a phone line CONFIGURATION I. Check hardware configuration II. License Setup USING AUTOREMINDER I. Make an appointment with automatic reminder call II. Make an appointment with automatic reminder call confirmation III. Use pre-recorded audio file for announcing your name RECORD YOUR MESSAGE I. Record message using telephone II.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC INSTALLATION This section covers installation instructions for Voicent software and hardware. The required hardware is a standard voice modem that can be obtained from Voicent or your local computer retailers. Your computer might have a voice modem installed already. So in that case, you only need to install the software programs – usually takes less than five minutes. The installation steps are summarized here and illustrated by the following flow diagram. 1.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC I. System requirements Software requirements Windows 2000, XP or later. Hardware Intel Pentium III processor or later (Desktop computer preferred) 128 Meg or more memory a voice modem A voice modem is device capable of playing and recording audio over a telephone line. If you are not sure whether your computer has a voice modem or not, just go ahead with the installation. The software will inform you if it cannot find a voice modem.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC modem, or Zoom 3075 PC card modem. You can get these modems from your local retailers. Use an external modem External modems are easier to install on a desktop or a laptop computer. However, these modems are not only more expensive but also less reliable than internal PCI modems. Test it fully before put the system into real use. Warning: Zoom 3049 external modem does not work with Intel Pentium 4 Hyper-Threading (HT) machine. A future driver might fix the problem. II.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC Install from a Download package Voicent smart download manager allows you to download the entire software program to your computer. It allows you to download the whole program one piece at a time, stop and resume download at different times, and automatically assembles the whole program once all pieces are downloaded. Click on Install Voicent Programs after download is completed.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC Please note that supporting V.90 or V.92 data transmission standards does not imply your modem is voice capable. A good indication of voice capability is the inclusion of voice mail software in the modem package. We only support Voicent 3025 Data/Fax/Voice PCI modem. 4). Check voice modem quality The quality of your voice modem has a huge impact on the call quality.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC 1) There is a long pause at the beginning of the audio messa ge. 2) No audio message is played when someone picks up the phone. 3) The audio message has already played when someone picks up the phone. 4) The system freezes when a call is in progress. The best solution is to get a Voicent voice modem. III. Install modem and connect it to a phone line Modem installation involves installing the modem hardware and its driver.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC If in step 5 the driver provider is Microsoft, then your driver installation is not correct. The default Microsoft driver does not support voice. Please click Update Driver button to install the correct modem driver. If your modem is installed successfully, then simply connect your telephone wall jack to the modem jack marked LINE. You can also connect a regular phone to the other modem jack marked PHONE.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC C O NF I G U R A T I O N I. License Setup The license setup window is automatically invoked during installation. If you don’t have a license during the installation, you can do it after installation. To invoke the license setup window, select Setupà License from the Voice nt Gateway main menu. 1) Setup shareware license [skip this step if you have full product license file] Fill in your name and phone number, and then click OK.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC attached file of the email message. Save the attached file to a directory of your choice, such as C:\temp. Please note that some email programs directly include the license file in the message body instead as an attached file. In this case, please follow instructions in B). A). In the Setup License dialog, click Manage Licenses … button. Click the Browse button. In the Open File dialog, select license file you saved from email attachment. Click Install New License Button.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC USING AUTOREMINDER I. Make an appointment with automatic phone reminder To invoke AutoReminder program, click on the AutoReminder icon on the Windows desktop. The left pane of the window is the main daily calendar area where appointments are displayed. The right pane is the monthly calendar. You can reschedule an appointment by moving the appointment to a different time slot. You can also dragn-drop an appointment to a different day.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC selected. Warning: Since your modem occupies one phone line, you need another phone line to receive the reminder call. If you have a cell phone or another phone line, you can test it yourself. Otherwise, you will need a friend to help you to test it. 2. Enter the phone number you wish to dial. The phone number can be your second phone number, your cell phone number, or your friend’s phone number. Select a Start Time. 3.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC 8. When you receive the phone call, pick up the phone and say hello. After that, you should hear the appointment reminder message. The message automatically includes the appointment date, time, and call back number. If an answering machine picks up the call, AutoReminder will wait till the beep and then leave a message. If you complete the above steps, you are ready to use AutoReminder to making calls for your business or personal use.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC For detailed call history of a particular appointment, you can double click on the appointment in the calendar to invoke the Edit appointment dialog. Click Call Detail Button to invoke the call history dialog. If there is a voice message, you can click on the Message in the Confirmation column. Once you click on it, you favorite wav player program should start playing the voice message.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC Detailed Call Report for all calls for a particular day can be accessed from the View main menu. II. Use pre-recorded audio file for announcing your name If you do not like the text-to-speech pronunciation of your name or business, you can use a pre-recorded audio message for your name. Please see RECORD YOUR MESSAGE section later in the document for message recording instruction.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC RECORD YOUR MESSAGE There are several ways to record your voice messages. If you do not have a professional recording studio, the best way is to use telephone recording. I. Telephone recording Starting from release 2.0, you can use Voicent Gateway to record your . message using any telephone. To do so, click on Voicent Gateway icon From the Voicent Gateway window, select Operation à Recording… to invoke the recording dialog.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC If you have a pre-recorded file that is of a different format, you can always use the Sound Recorder to convert it to the correct telephony format. Simply open the file in Sound Recorder, select Save As …, do the same as in the previous paragraph. III. Record using other sound recording device Record your message using other recording device to create a .wav file. Once the file is created, you may need to convert the format to 8.000 KHz, 16 Bit, Mono.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC USING BROADCASTBYPHONE To invoke BroadcastByPhone, click the icon on Windows. The main window is a spreadsheet like area for entering name and phone numbers. The Status column will be filled by the program after calls are made. You can copy-paste call list from/to programs like Microsoft Excel. You can also import call list from a text file. I. Prepare broadcast calls 2. Create a call list. Enter names and phone numbers. Save the call list by click file -> save.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC 4. When you receive the phone call, pick up the phone and say hello. Once BroadcastByPhone detects a human voice, it will play the audio message. If an answering machine or voice mail answers the phone, the software will detect it and leave a message after the beep. Please say “hello” after answering the phone call. The system will play the message after it a) detects a human voice; b) detects an answering machine and a beep, or c) time out after several seconds of silence. 5.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC B. Design a customized message template 1) Invoke the Message Designer by selecting Broadcast à Message Designer from the main menu. In the Message List dialog, click on New. The Message Designer dialog should appear. 2) From the Message Designer Dialog, click New. In the New Message Item dialog, select Audio Message. Click on the Browse button to select the overdue.wav file. Click OK. The new audio item should appear in the Message Item window. 3) Click New button again.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC You can see that a new column BookTitle is inserted automatically. The content of the column will be used in each phone call to announce the overdue book title using text-to-speech technology. For example shown above, the first call to John Smith will say the book title as “American History” after playing the general overdue message. III. Collecting responses With professional version of BroadcastByPhone, it is also response from each phone call.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC Since responses can not be collected if an answering machine answers the phone call. We have to design the message differently for human pick up and answering machine. Select the check box Play different messages for answering machine and human pickup. 2) Select message items for Answering Machine. Click New, then in the New Message dialog, click Browse, and then select the audio file meeting.wav. Click OK. 3) Select message items for human pickup.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC message. In the main spreadsheet window, you can see there is a new column titled Confirmation. Enter the names and phone numbers for the meeting attendees. Start broadcasting by select Broadcast à Start/schedule. Click Start Now. The Broadcast Message in the dialog displays the message ID of the call. Since the audio message is already select in the message template, there is no need to select an audio file here as we did in the previous sections.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC WHAT’S NEXT Start using it. Help topics are accessible from the main menu. More information can be accessed from Voicent’s website at http://www.voicent.com/support. If you are using the shareware version, you can Purchase a product license from http://www.voicent.com. If you are a software developer, please take a look at the developer section of Voicent’s website. Voicent Gateway is a standard based development platform for interactive telephony applications.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC F R E Q U E N T L Y A S K E D Q U ES T I O N S ( F A Q ) Generic questions for all product G1. What is Voicent product used for? Voicent product is an automated telephone notification system that runs on any desktop PC or laptop computer. It is widely used by medical professionals, churches, schools, small businesses, organizations, and any entity requires automatic telephone communications.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC The major differences are: 1). Professional version supports interactive touch tone response and voice message; and 2). Professional version is capable of playing different messages for human pick up vs. answering machine; and 3). Professional version can customize and personalize your telephone message using a built-in Message Designer. With Professional version, the system can: I. Collect confirmation or response from recipient.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC The Standard version of Voicent AutoReminder uses a fixed reminder message and thus is only suitable for appointment reminder calls. For doctor offices, we recommend the Professional version so patients can confirm their appointments. G4. I’ve installed Voicent software. I hear the modem dialing, but the phone number it just dialed doesn’t ring. What’s wrong? 1). First Check you phone line. If you use a regular phone line, please check your phone line connection.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC The best way to find out is to install the Voicent software and run the program. If you have installed Voicent software and see an error message Voicent Gateway cannot find a voice capable modem, then your system does not have a voice modem. Without a voice modem, no phone call can be made. To see what modem is installed on your system, please refer to the Installation session of this guide. G6.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC 4. Your sound card quality is poor. 5. Your have a noisy phone. You can try a different phone line to see if the delay will be eliminated. 6. Check your audio recording. Make sure there is no silence at the beginning of the recording. G10.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC 1. Your modem is not compatible. There are many brands of voice modems are on the market, not all voice modems work with the software. We officially support Voicent modem model 3025 or Zoom 3025c voice modems. 2. Make sure your computer has a sound card that can play .wav file. 3. Make sure your phone line is connected and has dial tone through the modem. (See G1.) 4. When you pick up the phone that rings, make sure to say hello and wait for a couple seconds. 5.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC 2.) You have a bad phone line on either or both outbound and inbound phone lines. If you use a cell phone, the wireless reception can be bad. Try to use different phone line or different cell phone. 3).Your machine or sound card is not good quality. 4).Try to use telephone recording as described in RECORD YOUR MESSAGE section of this document. 5).Use a better microphone and a less noisy recording room. G16.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC B3. When I start Voicent AutoReminder/BroadcastByPhone I got an error message saying Failed to connect to Voicent Gateway? Voicent Applications, AutoReminder and BroadcastByPhone, are separate programs from the Voicent Gateway. The Gateway is actually the program that makes the phone calls. In order for AutoReminder or BroadcastByPhone to work, a connection with the gateway has to be established. Check whether Voicent Gateway is started or not.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC 2) Use copy & paste: Import your phone list from your database file to Microsoft Excel spreadsheet first, then copy-and-paste the whole list to the phone section of BroadcastByPhone spreadsheet. B5. I have a large call list that cannot be finished in a day. I set up the broadcast as recurring calls every morning. But the calls always start from the beginning.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC D1. Do you sell an SDK that would allow me to add an alternative means of user interface? Yes. There are two ways to do it: A. To interface with AutoReminder. The interface is easy to use. You need to build your application based on AutoReminder professional version. Please refer to http://www.voicent.com/devnet/reminder_integ.htm B. To directly integrate with Voicent Gateway Use Client SDK. With this library, your app can directly integrate with Voicent Gateway.
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC GETTING HELP If you still have problems after going through this document, we are glad to assist you. There are several ways to get help from us: Please make sure that you are using Voicent 3025 data/fax/voice modem. Problems like poor call quality, delay at the beginning of the audio message are most likely cause by a poor quality voice modem. We do not support other brand of voice modems. 1).
VOICENT COMMUNICATIO NS INC Phone support is not free. You have to have a support contract before calling technical support. If you would like to purchase per incident support, call 800. 948.1198. Copyright: This document contains proprietary information protected by copyright, and this Quick Start Guide and all the accompanying hardware, software, and documentation are copyrighted. @ Copyright 2003, 2004, 2005. Voicent Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
