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OBi110: feature like Auto Attendant that filter donation/sales/survey calls

Started by flsf, February 24, 2011, 03:18:56 PM

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flsf

A lot of people use caller ID to filter calls.  But sometimes some of those donation/sales(like newspaper, loan, etc)/survey calls, etc they call you will valid caller id(phone number) so you can't tell until you receive the call to see what they are for.

How about a feature similar to Auto Attendant which you can route all the calls or selected calls (using InboundCallRoute) to it.  And the first thing this new "Auto Attendant" ask the caller is if they are the following.
1) Press 1 if you are friend/relative
2) Press 2 if this is a sales call
3) Press 3 if donation call
4) .....survey call
5) ...... (additional selection like "if calling from school", etc)
6) others

For Business user, can create a whole different list.  Like Press 1 if you are calling for Customer support, etc.

Someone else may be able to come up with a better list.  Also what's in the list hopefully is selectable from OBi device GUI.

And depend on their selection and option you set, it can forward the call to phone port or other Service.  Or reject the call by saying the phone number you are calling doesn't accept sales call (or survey call), etc depend on the setting.  So you can use OBi device GUI to specific if we allow such survey call or donation call and where to route it to.  If we do allow donation call forward to PHONE Port, may be display something in the caller ID field to indicate it is a donation call?  May be in the caller ID name, add something in the beginning like  "(donation) Caller name".  Even better if we can disable certain donation call during certain period of the day.  Like no donation call during dinner time, etc.
Of course they can lie about what they call you for, but hopefully most of those survey, sales, or donation call answer the "auto attendant" truthfully.

I am sure many people wanted such a device and could definitely increase sale.  Pretty much a "Personal Secretary" to help filter phone calls.  Making this OBi110 device something that is way way more useful then just a Voip device.  People may buy this even if they are not using Voip.

MichiganTelephone

Quote from: flsf on February 24, 2011, 03:18:56 PMI am sure many people wanted such a device and could definitely increase sale.  Pretty much a "Personal Secretary" to help filter phone calls.  Making this OBi110 device something that is way way more useful then just a Voip device.  People may buy this even if they are not using Voip.

Really I think the best option would be to have a page under user settings where you could build your own menu tree, routing calls to different Digit Maps depending on the single digit that the caller presses (sort of like the auto attendant but with the selections user configurable).  The real problem is the answering message - there is no single outgoing message that would satisfy everyone (especially when you consider that not all OBi purchasers speak English), and while in theory you could give people a way to record their own answering message, audio files really consume memory quickly.  Even if you could store the audio in some compressed (royalty-free) format, you then need the software to compress and decompress the audio, and even compressed audio can chew up an awful lot of memory that could be used for other features, call logs, etc.

But if the memory were actually available to allow users to record their own greetings, this would not be a bad idea.
Inactive, no longer posting or responding to messages.  Goodbye and good luck.  Some of my old Obihai-related blog posts have been moved to http://tech.iprock.com - note this in NOT my blog; I have simply given the owner permission to repost some of my old stuff.

flsf

Quote from: MichiganTelephone on February 24, 2011, 08:52:56 PM
Quote from: flsf on February 24, 2011, 03:18:56 PMI am sure many people wanted such a device and could definitely increase sale.  Pretty much a "Personal Secretary" to help filter phone calls.  Making this OBi110 device something that is way way more useful then just a Voip device.  People may buy this even if they are not using Voip.

Really I think the best option would be to have a page under user settings where you could build your own menu tree, routing calls to different Digit Maps depending on the single digit that the caller presses (sort of like the auto attendant but with the selections user configurable).  The real problem is the answering message - there is no single outgoing message that would satisfy everyone (especially when you consider that not all OBi purchasers speak English), and while in theory you could give people a way to record their own answering message, audio files really consume memory quickly.  Even if you could store the audio in some compressed (royalty-free) format, you then need the software to compress and decompress the audio, and even compressed audio can chew up an awful lot of memory that could be used for other features, call logs, etc.

But if the memory were actually available to allow users to record their own greetings, this would not be a bad idea.

I agree the best would be some kind of feature to allow building your own menu tree.  So how is OBi110 "auto attendant" currently work?  It doesn't sound like it is recording the whole sentences in audio file.  Either it is using some kind of dictionary with many different recorded words or maybe some kind of text-to-speech software?  I am sure they can build on top of the existing infrastructure of "Auto Attendant" and provide some extra phases people can choice and able to route the call to what user specified or terminated the call with few phases provided that make sense.  For example, just add some generic answering phases like...
"Please wait while transferring your call"
"This kind of call cannot be made at this time.  Good Bye"
"Survey/Sale Call is not allowed.  Good Bye"
etc
And they can always add more based on feedback in this forum.  If they cannot do text to speech in OBi110, may be the next version of hardware can provide that feature.
It would be great to allow recording your own voice and different language but since the main target currently is US customer, English is good enough for now.  Remember they can always start with something very basic and support only one level instead of multiple levels of menu tree.  And future firmware can improve on that.

flsf

Right now OBi110 is getting so popular because it works with Google Voice.  At this moment, connect to GV is the killer feature for this product.  Pretty much no other ATA device has that.  But once GV either block this or discontinue the free service, OBi110 will need some other feature that can attract user which currently no other low price ATA device has.  At this moment, I don't think any other lower price ATA device has feature like Obihai attendant and ALSO allow user to build their own menu tree.
This could be the next killer feature.  Something that people want to get even if they are currently not using any Voip service.  And this feature should work with MagicJack, NetTalk, Ooma also so those users may want to buy this too.
Obi110 need more things that can separate it from the rest of similar price ATA.