New Digital Voice Dialer with remote dial-in enhancements

BrightArrow's latest Digital Voice Dialer (Version 2010.01XL) includes a streamlined new interface for launch automated dials from any telephone.

Here are some changes since the prior version:

1. It can now display any Caller ID number, even when a dial is launched from a telephone. For schools, it can show the the district or school’s Caller ID.
   
2. You have a new toll-free (888) number to launch a dial, along with a simplified and secure dial-in interface.
   
3. The system delivers calls extremely fast -- 4x faster than the prior dial-in number.
   
4. With the 888 dial-in, you will receive the same high-accuracy logic of when the software should speak and leave messages that you experience with software-generated calls.

The below screen image shows the steps necessary to set up your system for remote dial in when using the latest version. To allow a dial of a list to be launched from a telephone, you will need to pre-configure that list with a Dial-in ID. From the list view, here are the steps (see the red numbers below):

1. Click on the “Dial-in ID” check box.
2. Click Apply.
3. Note the phone number, ID and password for dialing in from outside.
4. Once a list is configured, you can call in from outside by following the steps displayed

When you have a need to launch a call from a telephone, your notification system should be fast, easy and reliable. With Digital Voice Dialer, there's no need to log into a computer. You call, enter your ID and password, record your message, and hundreds or thousands of people can be notified immediately.

Some other dialing services offer this feature, but Digital Voice Dialer costs much less, and you get so much more. Remember the old saying "You get what you pay for"? Well, BrightArrow has shattered that adage to smithereens. With Digital Voice Dialer, you indeed get a lot more power, functionality and ease-of-use for a lot less cost than all other systems out there.

For a free trial, demo, price quote, references, or for questions, please reach out to us at Sales@BrightArrow.com or 800-649-9660.

New Digital Voice Dialer Release

BrightArrow announces the release of Digital Voice Dialer Version 2009.10.

Digital Voice Dialer 2009.10 allows easy and automated reading of contact data from popular databases such as PowerSchool, AERIES, Infinite Campus, eSIS, Skyward, and most others. You can record and deliver a message to thousands of recipients quickly and easily, even from offsite with only a telephone.

This version includes the following recent enhancements:

• The software can detect changes in the underlying contact sources and automatically update the dialing lists accordingly.
• For daily dials, such as school attendance, the software can read the attendance report and automatically perform the calls.
• In addition to the current call reports, the new version includes a master report for the administrator that tracks all calls that have occurred, in Excel-readable format.
• Digital Voice Dialer features expanded support for multi-language schools districts.
• Support for HTML e-mail content when the system sends out e-mail notification in addition to or in place of voice calls.
• Expanded options are included for extremely fast emergency calls.
• Remote dial-in feature for fast and easy cancellation calls from any telephone.

If you are a current customer, please visit the tech support page of our http://www.brightarrow.com/ to find the newest version. If you are not currently using Digital Voice Dialer, please reach out to us for a formal quote and a live (over-the-Internet) demo of the software.

And happy dialing...

New Release: BrightArrow Education Module for 3Com NBX

October 1, 2009 (Bellevue, WA).

BrightArrow is proud to announce its new version of Education Module for the 3Com NBX phone system.

Education Module Brochure

Education Module includes the following features for 3Com NBX schools and districts:

• Accurate and reliable automated dialing using your 3Com phone lines
• 911 Notification: Calls and e-mails a list of people whenever 911 (or other emergency code) is dialed
• On-demand recording: Allows your staff and faculty to record calls when necessary -- retroactively to the start of the call
• Malicious call notification: Dangerous callers can be recorded and authorities automatically notified
• Intercom: Uses the NBX telephones as an Intercom system
• Information hotlines: For homework hotline, influenza health line, menu line, etc.
• School Bells: Flexible system for scheduling bell sounds (or other sounds) over paging systems and speakerphones

Education Module 2009 is the next generation of the product that BrightArrow has provided to 3Com and their customers for the past several years. New features include:

• School Bells
• Enhanced Auto-Detect for accurate timing of speaking auto-dial messages
• Support for the latest version of the 3Com software, including expanded Caller ID display support
• Enhanced Call Recording capabilities, including WMA compression
• New "network armor" for ensuring system remains operational upon various external conditions
• Live interactive dial screen, updating as dials occur
• Main list view now shows detailed status information about dials
• Support for Microsoft's Anna text-to-speech voice (and other SAPI-compatible voices)

Please contact BrightArrow for information on obtaining this latest version, including maintenance plan options for existing Education Module schools and district.

Voice Notification to Non-English Households

Between 1979 and 2005, the number of school-age children (ages 5–17) who spoke a language other than English at home increased from 3.8 million to 10.6 million, or from 9 to 20 percent of the population in this age range (NCES Home Language Survey). Certainly the percentages vary dramatically from region to region, but it does illustrate an overall requirement in voice communication – the need to easily transmit voice messages in multiple languages.

Fortunately, most Student Information Systems (SIS) have a field designating the student’s home language. Digital Voice Dialer now makes it very fast and easy to transmit messages of various languages for any of the voice notification purposes that you may want.

Digital Voice Dialer has a streamlined approach to allow you to create messages of any language and distribute the calls appropriately based on your Student Information System’s home language field (such as the SASIxp Home Language field). Keep in mind that most of the below steps are only necessary to first set it up – once you have it set up, you can use it every day with new student lists from your SIS without having to configure it any further.




How to use the multi-language import feature of Digital Voice Dialer:


1. First you record the message in the various languages by clicking Add (or Edit) in the main Auto Dialer window for each language. You can record a voice message, type in an e-mail message, and even type (in that native language) text for text-to-speech read back (computer-generated voice) for the appropriate language.





2. Once you have the messages recorded (only necessary the first time you set it up), click the Multi Language Import button in the bottom right corner, and the instruction dialog box appears.



3. When you click OK, you can choose your import file (by default, it loads the prior file, so if you have your SIS export automatically into the same place, just click Ok) and the following Window appears.





4. The first time you encounter this Window, you can change the appropriate language and field mappings. Subsequent times, you simply hit Ok. The software imports the new list, splitting it into sub-groups based on home language. You can either launch the dial immediately at this point, or pre-schedule for dialing later.

Once configured this way, subsequent imports of data with Digital Voice Dialer will automatically identify the correct message for each household, making it fast and easy to reach out to parents in their native language.


For more information or try out the software, contact BrightArrow at 1-425-558-2100 (ask for “Sales”).

ExecutiveAssistant Speech Recognition Auto Attendant Setup Guide

Back in the 1970’s, touchtone telephones were first becoming popular. For those old enough to remember, it was a big time saver to eliminate the need to pull the dialer all the way around just to dial the “big” numbers like 8, 9 or 0. For those of you too young to remember, the word “dialing” had a very real and painful origin with the old rotary telephones.

Despite the huge transition from rotary dialing to touchtone, the transition from touchtone to voice is even more dramatic.

ExecutiveAssistant has speech recognition at its core. As opposed to speech recognition products for other phone systems that have voice engines servers “strapped on” to a legacy touchtone interface, BrightArrow ExecutiveAssistant for the 3Com NBX was entirely written using a speech recognition framework. Yes, you can always use touchtone with ExecutiveAssistant, but speech recognition is the underlying technology.

BrightArrow ExecutiveAssistant Auto Attendant Configuration Guide

Here is a link to a new detailed Setup Guide for 3Com ExecutiveAssistant’s Speech Recognition functionality:

Speech_Recognition_Auto_Attendant.pdf

You will also find it in the Installation_Information folder on the ftp.brightarrow.com ftp site. The document contains the following topics:

· What Is a Speech Recognition Auto Attendant?
· How to Set Up 3Com ExecutiveAssistant Speech Recognition
· Speak when Asked, or Interrupt
· How to Design Voice Prompts
· How to Design Flow Through the Groups
· Optimizing Pronunciations
· Reading Back Choices
· Multi-Tenant and Caller Speed Keys
· Changing Prompts Remotely
· Troubleshooting
· Backup and Maintenance
· Summary


Two Types of Speech Recognition

There are two fundamental ways to do speech recognition (and, of course, many variations of those two approaches). One is the method you typically see in the “voice dialing” feature of cell phones. It needs training, asking you to record each possible spoken name a few times. When you speak a name, it performs a sample-by-sample waveform comparison between the new audio and its database of samples to find the closest match. This way is simple and cheap enough to embed in inexpensive standalone devices. Unfortunately, its accuracy is very low and requires a lot of training even for that frustrating result.

The other method is called Hidden Markov Modeling. Originally developed at Princeton University, the most sophisticated speech engines use this approach. ExecutiveAssistant also delivers this type of speech technology, with a special emphasis on untrained, speaker-independent name and command recognition. Hidden Markov Modeling takes a significant amount of CPU and memory to achieve its high accuracy, and until the past couple of years you needed to purchase dedicated, high-priced telephony boards with DSP’s to be able handle the processing requirements of digital trunks. With today’s high-powered PC’s, however, those days are gone. Today’s 3.0GHz processor represents the first time that an entire PRI (23 trunks) can simultaneously process speech recognition within a single processor, without extra telephony boards or DSP’s.

To expower ExecutiveAssistant, 3Com offers unlimited ports at one low price, an unbelievably low-cost scalable cost model for a solution that uses the most successful server-based type of speech recognition.


Fill In The Blank instead of Multiple Choice

Speech recognition in an auto attendant makes it a much more pleasant experience for the caller. Even if the company uses a live operator during the day, a speech recognition interface for nights, weekends, lunches and breaks keeps the caller’s experience positive during those times. The interaction using a speech recognition auto attendant is somewhat different from and much friendlier than a touch-tone-only one.

Touchtone-based telephone menus are typically multiple choice:

For Sales, Press 1. For Service, Press 2. For Service Sales, Press 3. For Sales Services, Press 4. For Widget 1 Sales, Press 5. For Widget 2 Sales, Press 6. And so on and so on.

Speech recognition-based menus are fill in the blank:

Please say the name of the person or department you would like to reach now.

With speech-recognition, you can even get the best of both worlds:

Please enter an extension, press 1 for a list of options, or say the name of the person or department you would like to reach now.

Which voice menu delivers the most flexible, elegant, friendly and scalable interface? Over time, we expect that touchtone will be disappearing ... finding its place on museum shelves alongside the rotary telephone.




Companies Using 3Com NBX + ExecutiveAssistant Sound Big And Successful

A company usually wants to appear bigger and more successful than their competitors. Speech recognition is associated with large enterprise-level organizations, so when a caller reaches a professional-sounding speech recognition system, and it works, they automatically assume they are talking to a successful and leading-edge organization. In a competitive market where first impressions often make the difference between whether you get or lose a sale, the positive impression of a speech recognition auto-attendant delivers a powerful winning edge.

The Value of Reducing Absenteeism

At the Broward County Florida Office of Research and Evaluation, officials stated, “Absenteeism presents problems on three levels: that of the student, the school, and the community. On the student level, absenteeism contributes to poor academic performance. Moreover, truants are at greater risk for dropping out than are their peers. On the school level, absenteeism costs schools billions of dollars due to lost instructional time. Absenteeism also reduces the amount of state and federal funding that a school receives. Society is impacted through crime associated with students skipping school and individuals who failed to acquire the skills necessary to be productive citizens.”

http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/research_evaluation/Evaluations/Attendwaiveeval.pdf

Here are some studies collected by the University of Illinois documenting the correlation between attendance, grades and delinquent behavior. They include research that supports their conclusion that: ”research on school attendance consistently shows that low absenteeism is correlated to students' positive school behavior, participation in extracurricular activities, higher grades, and better long term educational outcomes.”

http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/BER/webpages/School_Attendance.html

Parent Notification Dialing is the single most effective technology tool available to notify parents of unexcused absences quickly enough to do something about it. With the increased usage of SPAM e-mail filters, it is more important than ever to deliver urgent and important messages to parents by voice. Fortunately, the prevalence of cell phones means that parents will receive the call promptly without the risk of the message being secretly deleted.

What can I do now? How should I choose which direction to go?

You have a number of options, and they tend to fall into three categories: (1) Voice-over-Internet hybrid dialing system, (2) hardware-based on-site dialing, and (3) high-priced hosted dialing services. I welcome you to review the following chart to better understand some of the pros and cons of each option.

Voice Notification Dialer Types

Voice-over-Internet technology has become mainstream and delivers dramatically lower costs and higher flexibility, because VoIP infrastructure is software-only. As a result, there are no additional costs in expensive telephony hardware, no maintenance headaches associated with this hardware, and no leased banks of phone lines needed to make those notification calls.

For a live (over-the-Internet) demo of the software, or a formal quote, please reach out to us at 425-558-2100 (800-649-9660) and ask for Sales, or e-mail Sales.

ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording for 3Com NBX

• BrightArrow ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording
  
  With so many new ExecutiveAssistant features being added and discussed recently, it’s been awhile since I last updated you about one of the product’s core features: Call Recording.
  
  Over the years, ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording has grown and expanded, both in terms of functionality as well as robustness. The essence to call recording is that you set up the NBX to route calls through the ExecutiveAssistant server and its associated “conference bridge” technology. That enables the audio of the calls to remain securely scrambled on the network, but streams the audio to disk as needed for recording purposes. It also allows the recording of any calls, including calls on non-NBX phones or even remote (cell) phones.
  
  Many of the competing IP phone systems only offer packet sniffers as their recording mechanism. Sniffing is a simple idea as long as the customer has the appropriate equipment to deliver necessary port mirroring on the switch. Unfortunately for those systems, the typical way of delivering sniffing is to configure the phone system to unscramble or un-encrypt the audio on the network (thus opening up the system for unauthorized sniffer-based spyware). Packet sniffing doesn’t allow recording of calls to/from cell phones, analog phones, or calls on the other side of a VTL – but ExecutiveAssistant call recording can record those devices. In addition, because packet-sniffing is a read-only approach, it becomes virtually impossible to be in compliance with taping laws for many states.
  
  3Com NBX Uniquely Allows Organizations to Record Legally
  
  Please understand that I am not an attorney and would never offer legal advice – you should be consulting an attorney in your state or province to identify the laws and associated penalties. Instead, I am relaying (in a non-legal sense) opinions stated on Web sites that detail taping laws (like http://www.rcfp.org/taping/). In that site, for example, you will see that the states of California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington require consent by all parties for calls to be recorded. In addition, any organizations that call from one-party states to those states list above probably need the consent of all parties, because it is typically advised that you follow the laws of the stricter state in inter-state calls. In other words, if the organization will ever call any of the above states, then they need a mechanism by which the call recipient knows the call is being recorded.
  
  Implied consent of all parties is fairly easy when calls are coming into an auto-attendant or a call center. Most organizations take care of that by including a “your call may be recorded” in the incoming greeting.
  
  Consent of all parties is trickier, however, for DID incoming calls, and is extremely difficult for outbound calls. Many offices that need to record calls want to record all types of calls, including calls coming into DID’s as well as outbound calls. Depending on the phone system and how it manages DID’s, many systems are not well-equipped to play a warning before passing the DID call off to the employee’s telephone.
  
  When it comes to outbound calls, the 3Com NBX with ExecutiveAssistant is uniquely qualified in its feature of including a periodic beep to cover legal requirements of all-party-consent for outbound calls. ExecutiveAssistant has an option to play a background periodic beep tone when a call is being recorded, or is even on-demand for its retroactive record feature.
  
  The potential criminal penalties for not following the taping laws listed in the Web sites include stiff fines and imprisonment in many states. Call recording is a powerful and useful tool, and once you start using it for business you find it irreplaceable, but it also is a tool that should be used legally. The ability of empowering your customers to obey the law provides you with a competitive sales advantage over other phone systems.
  
  Recent Enhancements with ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording
  
  For those of you who haven’t worked with ExecutiveAssistant call recording recently, I thought I’d update you on the nuts and bolts of some of the recent changes, the bulk of which were designed to make the recording mechanism seamless and reliable:
  
• With NBX R6.0 and CDR R6.0.7 (and using the latest ExecutiveAssistant) the CDR reports are now automatically scrubbed to remove the references to WAV phones that affected some of the reports in earlier versions.
  
• An ExecutiveAssistant installation typically includes the installation of the Sentry Service on a different PC (can be a shared PC that is always running but need not be logged in), to ensure call coverage for inbound and extension-to-extension recorded calls. With earlier R6.0 releases of the NBX, there was a problem relying on the Sentry Service with calls from the NBX auto-attendant that were to be recorded, but that was fixed with NBX R6.0.41.
  
• In some cases, sites reported audio problems or latencies when calls were routed through the EA server. This is not a problem with the software, but instead of the environment – it is a correctable condition. When such conditions have been reported to and investigated by 3Com, they have been corrected by doing one (or more) of the following:
  
  - On the server, turn off real-time virus scanning, software firewalls, hyper-threading and spyware scanning (instead you can have it do a nightly scan)
  
  - On the switch, make sure that packets coming out of the server are explicitly Tagged as Voice – particular important in a VLAN environment
  
  - Put the EA server explicitly on the same switch as the NBX
  
  - Turn off hyper-threading if using an Intel processor
  
  - Make sure you haven’t exceeded your recommended CPU speed for the number of Media Ports installed
  
• Parking recorded calls did not originally play music-on-hold. Also, a Parked call that timed out wasn’t reporting as such to the Parker to whom it returned. Those have both now been corrected.
  
• Several years ago, Caller ID was not displayed in the LCD display with recorded calls. That was corrected starting with Version R5.0.6 of the NBX. If you are not seeing Caller ID, make sure your TSP version is compatible with your NBX version, and that you have the telephone extensions listed in the TSP.
  
• Outbound Caller ID Presentation was not displaying for outbound calls going through recording. That is now corrected with the concept of a Personal Media Port.
  
• Earlier versions of the 3Com Media Ports were not as reliable as the current Media Ports. 3Com has reworked the drivers to be able to handle high-volume call centers, without failing. In addition, ExecutiveAssistant has built-in mechanisms to make sure calls still flow even if the server goes down for normal “Windows” reasons.
  
• You can now record outbound calls from your cell phone (in addition to the inbound cell phone call recording that was always available with Find Me Follow Me) with the help of a new feature for allowing you to call into the NBX and out again through an NBX trunk.
  
• The system can now automatically compress the recordings to .WMA format, which takes only about 65KB/minute of storage.

We have enhanced the document that explains how to set up call recording with step-by-step instructions and some new troubleshooting tips. I suggest you read the latest document to better understand the bits and bytes of 3Com Call Recording technology. You can find this at:

http://www.brightarrow.com/sales/EA/3Com_ExecutiveAssistant_Recording_Technical_Guidelines_Ver_5.00.85.pdf

You also can get a detailed sales brochure for call recording, at:

http://www.brightarrow.com/3Com_NBX_Call%20Recording_5.00.pdf

If you are using ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording, I would highly recommend that they upgrade to the latest version to take advantage of the above improvements and optimizations. If you have had the product for over one year, they will need to purchase a Maintenance Agreement to be upgraded, but those agreements are very reasonably priced – please contact your reseller (or BrightArrow) for specifics.