Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!linac!att!news.cs.indiana.edu!sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
From: sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT answering Machine info.
Message-ID: <1991Mar4.195639.6460@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 5 Mar 91 00:56:20 GMT
References: <1991Mar3.054443.3135@math.ucla.edu> <1991Mar4.161518.28630@news.cs.indiana.edu> <46513@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Organization: Computer Science Department, Indiana University
Lines: 67

>>And a "touch-tone shell" feature.  [...]
>>have the beeps you enter >on the phone be translated to ASCII
>
>You must be kidding.  You want a machine that can I/O CD quality sound,
>and you want to resort to a 12-character alphabet?  

No, I'm not really kidding.  People have done this sort of thing
before - someone from AT&T demonstrated a Touch-Tone Shell at Usenix once.
He phoned up his workstation, and it said "Login:" and he typed
some sequence of touch-tone keys that corresponded to his userid an
password, and typed "M" "A" "I" "L" on the phone, 
and started reading his mail , etc etc.  You need to set up a mapping
between the 12 touch-tone keys and ASCII, of course, in order to
be able to get to all the various characters.  But it can be done.

I don't necessarily want to be able to log in and have my mail
read to me, but if you had something that could do this, you would
have the beginnings of a voice-mail toolkit.

It would be fun to play with.  Gimme something that can turn the
touch-tone sound for '4' into a '4' coming in the serial port,
and I could have a lot of fun with that.  You could write simple
Unix shell scripts to do voice mail stuff.


suppose you had some sound files sitting around with useful phrases in them.
and a 'phonesound' command that sent a sound file out the phone line,
and a 'get-DTMF-character' command that read  a touch-tone from the
phone line and converted it to the appropriate ASCII digit.
    ...

    #!/bin/sh

    # says "Hello, welcome to Steve's voice response system"
    # and sends it down the phone line
    phonesound welcome.snd

    while :; do
	# says "What do you want to do now?"
	phonesound what-now.snd

	# read a tone from the phone line
	x=`get-DTMF-character`
	case "$x" in
	"0")
	    # says "OK, I am now rebooting the machine"
	    phonesound ok-reboot.snd
	    reboot
	    ;;
	"1")
	    # Says "What time do you want a wake-up call for"
	    phonesound what-time-wakeup.snd
	    time=`get-DTMF-string`
	    at $time phone-user-wake-him-up
	    ;;
	esac
    done


etc etc.  It'd be fun.  Who can direct me to a device that converts
DTMF to Ascii?  There must be one somewhere.

..Steve
-- 
Steve Hayman    Workstation Manager    Computer Science Department   Indiana U.
sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu                                    (812) 855-6984
NeXT Mail: sahayman@spurge.bloomington.in.us