Parliant answers the call with OpenBase SQL
Parliant's PhoneValet Message Center brings the telephone into the Macintosh world
"The database is the foundation for all we do, so it has to be rock-solid."
Wouldn't it be great if your phone would simply announce out loud who was calling? If it would keep an accurate and accessible log of all your in-coming and out-going calls numbers, names, date, duration and provide you with the information you needed about any particular call whenever you needed it?
What if, instead of fumbling with cassette tapes, you could record conversations with a click of a mouse -- and store them permanently in an easy to search database? What if, instead of checking voicemail for that important message, when it came in, your phone found you?
What if, you could talk to your Macintosh and make it do things for you over the phone?
Now you can, thanks to Parliant Corporation and its PhoneValet Message Center product.
Transforming telephony
Winner of multiple awards, including "MacWorld Best of Show 2004 Boston," the PhoneValet Message Center leverages Apple Mac OS X technologies, such as voice recognition and speech synthesis; proven OpenBase SQL relational database technology; and telephony services to provide individuals and companies with a remarkably useful and versatile digital phone assistant.
"We specialize in products that literally listen to the people that use them," says Kevin Ford, CEO of Parliant Corporation.
In response to a spoken, hands-free "Call Bob Smith" command, PhoneValet will initiate lookup, note geographical location and dial the appropriate 7-, 10- or 11-digit number for you. And it will use the correct calling card, if you've assigned one.
Also fluent in text-to-speech, PhoneValet announces aloud who is calling, before the second ring a much faster and less disruptive way to screen calls than running to look at Caller ID or waiting in suspense for a call "to go to the machine."
And like a good assistant, PhoneValet doesn't just passively take messages, either. It chases you down, notifying your pager, cell phone and/or email any time you receive a call, and providing you with name, number and time, as well as a sound file attachment, so you can listen to the message, wherever you are.
"Since it's in the database, if you're looking for a particular conversation two years later, you can say ???Find all calls made to this person, or number, with a sound file attachment this approximate length, between this date and this date' and PhoneValet will find the right call out of thousands, in just seconds," says Ford. "I know of no other tool, on any platform, that does that."
"Our intent is to provide the foundation upon which Mac people can integrate telephony into their work life and into other applications," says Ford. "Such a foundation has to sit on a rock-solid relational database, so we built PhoneValet on OpenBase SQL."
Why call in OpenBase SQL?
Choosing a proven and robust relational database like OpenBase SQL right from the start, has paid off in many others ways, says Ford. "We got our product to market faster. We got great backup features and we got remote database diagnostic capabilities that are critical to our customer support model."
"Most importantly," he says, "because we didn't have to re-invent the database, we could focus on those areas where we add value. Then, because we had OpenBase SQL as our database engine, we could add new innovation and features that we would not have otherwise contemplated."
In the future, for example, says Ford, Parliant may want to offer solutions in which multiple client devices are served by a server application running remotely on another system.
Another key consideration was the feasibility and affordability of collaborating with other developers to build integrated software solutions.
Since OpenBase SQL is inherently client/server, it allows simple integration between applications without synchronization between flat files or databases.?? So other developers can integrate PhoneValet with their solutions easily by using the OpenBase SQL database as the sharing mechanism.??
"Other developers don't have to program in Cocoa to have their applications work with PhoneValet," says Ford. "They just have to use standard SQL commands using any development environment supported by OpenBase."??
Committed to the Mac platform
OpenBase's commitment to the Macintosh platform and its track record as the first relational database to run on the Mac OS X platform were also important to Parliant.
"We designed PhoneValet to unleash the creativity of the Mac user," says Ford. Support for Apple Scripting, for example, makes it easy for users to integrate their other Mac applications with PhoneValet.
"Watching what Mac people can do with PhoneValet has been the most fun of all," says Ford. One of his Australian customers, for example, uses the message center to offer a subscription service to fellow fishing enthusiasts. Anglers use a touch-tone password to trigger PhoneValet to read back the latest fishing report phoned in from the lake they're planning to visit.
"There's really no limit to what people can do with PhoneValet," says Ford.
"Once a call is logged or a conversation is recorded digitally, people want to push it around to store it, share it, edit it, and attach it to another communication or document. With PhoneValet and the ability to store more than 200 hours of conversation in just 1 GB, there's no reason not to capture and keep and make better use of voice communications an important part of your business history forever."
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