Emails, the most used utility on Internet, have dramatically changed the way the world communicates. Gone are the days of ‘snail’ mail and expensive telephone calls. Type in the message, click the ‘send’ buttons and within minutes the email is sent from New York to New Delhi. In a short span, emails have become the way the corporate world communicates.

Another recent communication revolution that happened outside the Internet is the Mobile Telephony. Mobile phones caught the fancy of the world because it gives the freedom of being available anywhere, anytime.

Emails being so important to business, shouldn’t the users be able to access their emails from wherever they are? Telephonic email access solutions allow the users to access their emails through a telephone, without using computer or the Internet.

Speech and Software Technologies (I) Pvt. Ltd. has developed two telephonic email access solutions – TeleMail and HelloNet.

Telephonic Email Access Solutions
A telephonic email access solution is an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) that allows users to remotely access their mailbox using telephone. Once the user access the mailbox, the desired mail can be opened and its contents read back by a Text-to-Speech Converter. The IVRS has to be tightly integrated with the Mail Server.

IVRS requires a CTI card to be installed in the Server. This is an ‘add-on’ card, which is used for integrating telephone lines to Server. The number of telephone ports to be activated (i.e., telephone lines connected) will be directly proportional to the user base. Depending on the number of users, CTI card can either be analog (2, 4, 8 or 16 Ports etc) or digital (T1 or E1). Normally the access telephone lines can be connected to the cards either directly or through EPABX.

The first-generation telephonic emails access solutions deployed touch-tone or DTMF method for option selection. However, more advanced solutions use speech recognition for this purpose. Instead of dialing a digit from the telephone keypad, users can just speak out the menu option. A speaker independent, speech recognition engine will be used for this purpose.

Telephonic email access solutions are becoming feature rich. The capabilities of such software are not just limited to getting the mails read back. Now the users will be able to execute almost all mail functions such as replying, deleting, forwarding, sending new emails, etc.

Speech-to-text converters available today are speaker dependent. A user has to train the recognition engine to his/her speech for continuous speech-to-text conversion. The technology has not so much advanced that the system will be able to convert continuous speech to text without prior training. This has posed a restriction in replying or sending new mail when accessing email system through telephone.

Most commonly used method to overcome this restriction is to record the spoken reply (or new mail) and send it as an attachment in wave format. The receiver should have a multimedia PC to play back the reply. The recorded wave files will be large in size. A wave file containing 60 seconds of speech will be nearly 1 MB in size and it will be difficult to send it as an attachment. The file will be compressed (typical ratio 8:1) to reduce the size so that it can be sent easily.

Another method is to pre-store a (or more) message and then send it as a standard reply. While some of the solutions may allow users to store individual messages, others permit only common messages.

Normally telephonic email access solutions should be able to open attachment in text format and read back using TTS. However, attachments in other formats like MS Word will contain tags, which has to be removed before presenting the text part to the TTS for reading. Without parsing the tags it will be impossible for TTS to read the text. Certain other files like spreadsheets pose another problem. Reading them out may not make any sense to the listener since the data in the file need not adhere to the conventional ‘left-to-right’ pattern followed by a TTS. So, all attachments may not be accessible over phone.

At times users may require to have the hardcopy of the mail. This is easy if the mail is accessed from the terminal. If accessed remotely, it is possible to receive the hardcopy of the mail if it can be faxed. Some of the advanced telephonic email access solutions have ‘fax-on-demand’ feature. After a mail is opened the user can request to send the mail content to a fax. Some of them allow attachments to be faxed too.

The idea of implementing a telephonic email access solution is to be in constant touch with business. So, it would be worthwhile if the user could be intimated when a new mail arrives. Various methods of intimation could be SMS (possible only on mobile phones), paging, dialing out to a pre-set number, etc. The idea is not to transfer the whole mail, but to inform the user that a new mail has arrived. If this intimation carries the sender details and subject line, the user could quickly decide whether to immediately call the Mail Server to access the mail or not.

Telephonic email access solutions may have GUI for configuring the access parameters and seeing usage reports.

Most widely used Mail Server is MS Exchange, followed by Lotus Notes. There are many other Mail Servers available in the market. A telephonic email access solution may be compatible with one or more of the popular Mail Servers.

Synchronizing the telephonic email access solution with the Mail Server has always been a challenge. All activities executed through telephone should reflect in the Mail Server. A mail read over phone should be marked as ‘read’ in the mailbox or a file deleted from telephonic email access solution should be moved to ‘Deleted Items’ box. Telephonic email access solution should be tightly integrated with the Mail Server to achieve this level of synchronization.