Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!watson
From: watson@ames.arc.nasa.gov (John S. Watson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT voice mail sample wanted
Message-ID: <17411@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 31 Oct 88 21:25:01 GMT
Reply-To: watson@ames.arc.nasa.gov (John S. Watson)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Lines: 40

In article <277.236CC2D9@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG> Bernard.Aboba@f445.n161.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Bernard Aboba) writes: 
> What does the NeXT Voice Mail application do?  Does it answer the 
> telephone, accept touch tone input, and branch, like my $200 Big Mouth 
> board does on a PC, or is it something much less functional?  I do not 
> think it is appropriate to call something VOICE MAIL unless it actually 
> does what a typical business voice mail system does.  Just wondering.

I don't really know what a typical voice mail system does, 
we only got our rotary-dial phones replaced by touch tone phones 
a couple months ago. :-)

But, from what I saw at the indrotuction, the "voice mail" application works
something like this (the sender and receiver both have NeXT machines):
You jabber something into the microphone (assuming you have a 
microphone connected to your system), and the the voice mail digitizes
and bundles up the data into your standard unix/uucp/usenet mail format,
and sends the "messages" to whoever you are mailing to on the 
usenet/arpanet/bitnet.  Upon receiving, the voice mail application 
automatically unbundles the message and plays it to you.  
Now instead of your boss writting you telling you to get back to work, 
you can actually hear his voice, in CD quality sound (or whatever 
quality your input is digitized as).

I'm sure the record industry's lawyers are going to love this.
Does anyone know how many bytes are in "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band"? :-).

It also makes me wonder if you can talk in a NeXT machine in your office,
transmit across the ethernet, and have it play back in real time,
on the NeXT machine down the hall.  

That's kind of why I want to see a sample of this stuff, 
to see how big it is going to be, and maybe get a feel for 
how much load there will be networks.

-- 
John "Myrtle" Watson, IBM heir in hiding      ARPA: watson@ames.arc.nasa.gov 
NASA Ames Research Center                     UUCP:  ...!ames!watson
Any opinions expressed herein are, like, solely the responsibility of, like, the
author and do not, like, represent the opinions of NASA or the U.S. Government.