Receiving voice messages in Outloook or IP Phone

[admin_2]

Hi,<br><br>can someone help me with the following issue:<br><br>We have a hearing impared employee and would like to convert his voice messages into text and display them on a number of end devices: PC (MS-Outlook), IP phone, PDA, pager. Currently we have one AVVID evaluation kit up an running on our LAN (one CallManager, 12 IP telephones). <br><br>Please provide a guideline for the stated goal. I heard that AVVID does not integrate Outlook and IP phones with Octel (our voice mail system) and requires full conversion to Exchange servers before any kind of Unified Messaging can be done. Thanks ahead!!!!!!<br><br>

[#2]

Couple of things here...

1st, yes, you're right in that we don't have an integration method to Octel at this point. Unity 3.0 will support AMIS and we're working on supporting the native OctelNet integration as well although I don't know when that will be available.

2nd, Unity doesn't have any capability to convert voice messages into text (we can turn text to speach, but not the other way around). Are you expecting Unity to do this or are you using another tool that reads in a WAV file and converts it to a text string?


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[#3]

Jeff, thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

1. I guess I expected Unity to do the voice-to-text conversion. Since it is not available, are there any non-Cisco voice-to-text applications that you can recommend?

2. Since Octel-to-CallManager integration is not supported can you recommend any other approach to this issue that may not involve Cisco products?

Again, our goal is to take a voice message stored on an Octel box, convert it to text, and deliver it to any medium that can display text (preferably a two-way pager).

Much appreciated!

[#4]

Well, I'm not really an expert in speach to text technology. We've been working with several speach recognition products in house for doing things like navigating your inbox via voice commands but that's a bit of a different thing than converting a voice stream into a text stream. I can ping some other folks around to see if any of them know of anything but you might check out IBM's offerings. They've been at that type of thing for years now... there's also a company called "Speach Works" that might have something along these lines. Someplace to start anyway.

this would, of course, rely on you being able to get a WAV file to pass into such a tool. Depending on which Octel system you're using, that might be a neat trick... I've only fiddled with a few different Octel offerings, but perhaps someone else out here has more insight into how that could be done.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[#5]

Thank you for your help. I will check back to see if you've got more info on this.