Voice applications can give callers the opportunity to leave and retrieve voice messages in electronic mailboxes, and to forward or delete them. In addition, voice mail applications should allow each subscriber to record a greeting for callers to hear. The greetings are recorded as voice segments.
Each mailbox can also have an audio name recorded for it. This is a voice segment that can be inserted into a general greeting if the subscriber does not record a greeting. For example, your voice mail application could have a general greeting that says:
“You have reached the mailbox of ‘.......’ Please leave a message after the tone.”
The owner of the mailbox then records his audio name, “John Smith”. This is inserted into the general greeting, so that what the customer hears is:
“You have reached the mailbox of ‘John Smith’. Please leave a message after the tone.”
The audio name can also be inserted into the message header that is heard before a message.
Some of the state table actions are specifically intended to provide voice messaging functions. State tables and custom servers use the Blueworx Voice Response voice database to access voice messages, greetings and audionames.
A mailbox is space that is reserved on the pSeries computer hard disk, so that an application can store messages. Without at least one mailbox, an application cannot use voice messaging.
Mailboxes are defined in an application profile, which includes optional information such as the password and the referral telephone number of the subscriber. When someone calls a messaging application, Blueworx Voice Response assigns each item of messaging information to a system variable.
The voice application can make control decisions based on the value of any system variable. For example, an owner of a mailbox can record alternative greetings to be spoken, and the messaging application could use the value of the Caller: Mailbox: Owner status system variable to determine which greeting to be spoken. (See System variables for more information.)
When a voice application includes the appropriate logic, callers can use the telephone to create distribution lists and send messages to all the mailboxes listed. A distribution list is a list of mailboxes to which messages can be sent. Each distribution list belongs to a subscriber's mailbox. Distribution lists can be either public, or private to the owner.
To avoid using up large amounts of disk space, you can limit the length of messages. You can also use subscriber classes to control the maximum number of messages in a single mailbox. Each subscriber class specifies this limit and, in addition, puts limits on the number of mailboxes, distribution lists, and greetings that can be recorded. Each application profile can then be assigned to a subscriber class, and applications can check subscriber class variables to ensure that the limits are not exceeded.