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”).