I am interested in replacing our existing appointment reminder system, HouseCalls, with your product. We process about 150 or more calls per day and I would like to be able to prerecord patient names and several (20-25) messages dealing with different appointment types. I would then send the application a comma delimited file that contains the patient name and appointment information along with an indicator of some sort telling the application which message to use. Is this possible using your product. Bear in mind that none of the message is text-to-speech but prerecorded speech concatenated together to form the message. If this is possible can you explain how I would set up to do it

This should not be that hard to set up using the built-in Message Designer. To invoke the Message Designer, select Appointment > Message Designer… from the program main menu. For more information about how to use the Message Designer, please refer to the product walkthrough under the Help menu.

First, create a different reminder message (message template) for each appointment type. Each message will have a different message Id so you can use it later when an appointment is created or imported.

Second, to create one reminder message, simply add pre-recorded audio files to the message. Assuming for each reminder message, all audio files are the same except the patient name is different for each appointment. To add patient name audio, create a new standard message item with type “audio message” instead of “contact name”, so the reminder message will not use Text to speech to read the name. For example, assume you want the reminder message to be: “Hi, this is doctor smith calling patient John for tomorrow’s appointment”, you could create the following three message items:

[audio file] before.wav
[standard item: audio file] john.wav
[audio file] after.wav

Where before.wav contains the recording for “Hi, this is doctor smith calling patient” and after.wav contains “for tomorrow’s appointment”. The [standard item: audio file] refers to an audio attachment per appointment. This attachment audio file is set for each appointment.

Save the created reminder message.

Third, when an appointment is created or important, specify everything else as usual; attach an audio file that is the patient name; and select the previously designed message Id for the reminder call.

I understand all but the third step where I import and attach the john.wav. Additionally if we want this recording to NOT use TEXT to speech and we want it to say something like. “Hello this is Dr. Smith calling for John, you have an appointment tomorrow April 20 at 2:00 PM, please bring all of your medication. Thank you.” What would the import file look like and would I be able to pre record the months, days and times

The format for an appointment in an import file is a line with a comma separately values. The appointment import format details can be found in the program Help file or online. In the place of the audio file column, use the full path to the john.wav file, such as “C:/My audio files/john.wav”.

For appointment time, it is a standard time and it is normally read by pre-recorded audio files. For Voicent software, we have both male and female voices for numbers, dates, etc. If you have to use your own recordings for date and time, replace the system audio files under C:\Program Files\Voicent\gateway\webapps\root\audio