A low-cost Audio Text system for rural communities

Author

Egeberg, Roger ; Gammill, Robert ; Rice, David

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., North Dakota State Univ., Fargo, ND, USA

fYear

1991

fDate

29-30 May 1991

Firstpage

132

Lastpage

136

Abstract

An AudioText system called CEVIS (call extension voice information system) has been provided for use in the county offices of the NDSU Extension Service. It runs on an IBM AT clone machine using two ProCAM cards supporting two phone lines and using about 70 megabytes of hard disk. Since one megabyte can hold about five minutes of digitized speech, the present CEVIS system can hold around five hours of speech in digitized form. A simple stateless user interface and a flexible hierarchical message structure are used. This message structure facilitates simple maintenance and easy expansion of the message base. It also allows use of the system without a printed guide to the messages it contains, by top-down exploration of topics. The system has been successfully tested at five different county extension offices, with a majority of calls coming outside business hours

Keywords

automatic telephone systems; electronic messaging; office automation; telecommunications computing; 70 MB; Audio Text system; CEVIS; IBM AT clone machine; NDSU Extension Service; ProCAM cards; call extension voice information system; digitized speech; flexible hierarchical message structure; hard disk; message base; rural communities; stateless user interface; telephone answering system; two phone lines; Computer science; Computer science education; Control systems; Information systems; Neodymium; Personnel; Speech; Telephony; Time sharing computer systems; User interfaces;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

WESCANEX '91 'IEEE Western Canada Conference on Computer, Power and Communications Systems in a Rural Environment'

Conference_Location

Regina, Sask.

Print_ISBN

0-87942-594-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WESCAN.1991.160534

Filename

160534