Speech to Text: A New Way to Manage VoiceMail

Tired of checking voicemail messages remotely? Frustrated with entering touch tones on your smartphone just to access your new messages in your voicemail box? Too noisy at the airport and you can’t really hear your messages?

If you have ever had these thoughts or frustrations, Speech to Text may be just for you. 

By simply having your voicemail messages automatically routed to a speech recognition engine, your new messages can be delivered to you as readable text in your email. With the most recent advances in speech technology and a little coaching for callers to speak clearly, listening to voicemail can be a thing of the past. 

With Speech to Text, your company becomes more responsive to urgent voice messages resulting in higher sales, better customer retention and increased personal productivity. Once voicemail is converted to text, messages can be searched, forwarded, archived and appended. Urgent messages can be checked discreetly in noisy places and in meetings ensuring importance messages never sit in your voicemail unheard. 

Speech to Text works with most existing phone equipment and mobile devices. There is no forklift upgrade and you can still use your phone to access voicemail messages, but you will likely never log in to your listen to voicemail again.

Let us help you learn how speech to text can help your business!

Toshiba Introduces UCedge Mobility Application for Smart Phones

UCedge, Toshiba’s second generation Mobility App for iOS and Android smart phones is now released. UCedge completely unifies the user’s desktop life with their mobile-life by actually cloning the desk phone. One-Number-Reach on incoming calls rings both the desk phone and the cell phone. This call may be answered on either phone, and can be sent between the two phones. For example, if you get a call on your desk phone and are just about to leave the office, you can send that call to your cell phone and continue your conversation on your way out. Alternatively, if you are on a call on your cell phone and walk into the office you can transfer that call to your desk phone to continue the conversation there. Calls answered using the cell phone can be transferred to any other internal extension or outside number, just as you would be able to do on your desk phone.

The smart phone connects via wifi if available, or uses cell service if wifi is not available. Call-thru proxy allows users to place outbound calls from their smart phone with the call actually originating from the office phone system. The outbound caller-ID information can either be the main number of the business or the Direct Inward Dial (DID) number of the user for those that wish to keep the caller ID of the cell phone private.

Visual Voicemail makes it easy to manage and listen to voice messages regardless of their order of arrival. Voicemail messages are streamed in real time with full synchronicity, so deleting a message using UCedge app will delete the message on the desk set and vice versa. Presence shows the status of colleague phones (whether they are available, on the phone, or in a do not disturb mode), and Instant Messages can be sent to other users when they are available or on the phone. Many more features and productivity tools are built into the app as well.

The UCedge app is available as a free download from the App Store, Google Play, and Google Search. It is available to all users of Toshiba’s IPedge, VIPedge and CIXsystems (CIX systems must also be equipped with an IPedge Applications Server). 

Telecommuting = VoIP = Expanding the Employee Pool = Increased productivity + Reduced Business Expense

Telecommuting provides employees with a wide range of opportunities to best serve their needs and the needs of the organization. The main advantages are obvious: The flexibility of working from home reduces transportation costs, allows employees to balance a home/business life schedule and offers the organization a competitive benefit for attracting high skilled employees who take fewer sick days and have reduced stress levels.

Telecommuting usually needs to be on a grand scale in order to allow a business to reduce expenses for workspace, parking, and energy use. That said, even on a lesser scale, studies reveal happier, more productive employees, with telecommuting attributable to increased attraction and retention of quality employees.

For example, forty percent of IBM’s employees telecommute, saving nearly $2.9 billion in reduced office space needs (and millions more on energy costs) since 1995. Telecommuting also permits businesses to de-concentrate their resources, leaving them less vulnerable to power outages, workplace illness or direct attack, and more nimble and better able to recover and continue operations after calamities.

Mobile technology is giving employees unprecedented geographical freedom in their work while expanding the pool of employees upon which businesses can call. The latest advances provide any and all employers the ability to offer this benefit with minimal technology expenses and in some cases even a savings. VoIP has transformed the communications industry and is ever increasingly changing the telecommuting landscape.

To learn more about how telecommuting can benefit your business, please call us at (781) 756-5100 or email info@generalcom.com.