Many of the services require customized announcements, for example, "Thank you for calling the Astroagency. Your Personal Astrologer is consulting the positions of the stars and planets and will be able to give you your horoscope in a moment. Please hold the line."
Another important function is sometimes called "vectoring", which means messages such as the following: "Thank you for calling National Airlines. If you wish to make a reservation, please dial 2. If you wish to have flight departure delay information, please dial 3. If you wish to speak with our agents at a certain airport, please say the name of the airport...."
The UT-IT supports advanced speech recognition features, including the use of more than one language.
Other features included are store and forwarding of voice, fax, and data messages -- that is, it gives the services of a centralized answering machine.
For creating messages, the UT-IP is quite flexible. Some clients put their messages on high-quality tape and deliver them to the Administration, which uses the UT-IP's operations system terminals (based on PCs) to enter the messages in the system.
For messages which must be created in a hurry, such as the closure of an airport for fog, the normal telephone network can be used to call up the UT-IP operations center and recite the voice message, which is then taped and loaded by Administration personnel.
Suppose the Astroagency wants to use a different message each day based on the positions of the stars that day, with a general message for all clients while they are waiting for their Personal Astrologer to answer -- with background music. This requires higher quality than is possible with a telephone call, so they use a special software package provided by Italtel which codes the message and the music in PCM and creates a file. They then use a modem or an ISDN call to send the file to the Administration.
The current version of the UT-IN is an ordinary Linea UT module which has been equipped with special service circuits, but the rest of the equipment is standard Linea UT modules (such as matrices, processors, and the operations and maintenance systems).
Each module can host up to 20 hours of messages and around 700 SS No. 7 trunks toward the SSP, and has the call-processing capacity to handle the short holding time traffic which is typical of this kind of service.
The trunks between the SSP and the IP use ISUP. The UT-IP will be connected with the other vendors' SSPs in Italy.
Italtel Societa' Italiana Telecomunicazioni Spa
Claudio Chiarenza, BUCT BPM
Comments to author:Claudio.Chiarenza@settimo.italtel.it
Contact for Information: Claudio Chiarenza - BUCT BPM
All contents copyright (C) 1995.Italtel S.p.a. All rights reserved. Revised: August 30, 1995