by Denis ONeil | Mar 27, 2020 | Customer Portal
EmailToVoice.Net continues to grow in features and functionality. On March 16th of 2020, we launched our new Customer Portal. The customer can see real time status of their jobs submitted through EmailToVoice.Net, change details in their Profile settings, create distribution lists, and much more.
Here is a quick summary of the capabilities of the EmailToVoice.Net Customer Portal
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- View All Jobs: The customer can view summary and detailed information on messages that have been sent through EmailToVoice.Net. Specific date ranges or a specific job number can be specified.
- Manage Personal Lists: The customer can setup distribution lists, which are then referenced by the LISTS tag in the content of the email for sending TTS or SMS messages to a group of recipients.
- New Broadcast: The customer can send a TTS, SMS or Email messages to one or more recipients directly from the Portal
- Quick SMS: A customer can send a Quick SMS message, one-way or two way, to one or more recipients directly from the Portal
- Manage Opt-Outs: The customer can specify a phone number that is never to be sent through the customer’s account. This is useful for phone numbers that have changed and should no longer be used. This is useful when an employee leaves the company and their personal cell phone number remains in lists.
- My Details: The customer can change profile settings, such as company address, email address or main account phone number. This includes the customer’s account password. To learn more about the very useful fields in the profile, refer below.
The Customer Portal
Our customers are businesses, from medium size to global enterprises. Before we launched our new Customer Portal, the customer could look back for information on messages by searching the inbox of the main email address on the account profile. That is still possible. But now the customer has an interactive dashboard to check the status of messages or review the number of messages that have been sent in the past and many more capabilities.
Customer Portal Login
UserName and Password
The username is prefixed with etv/. For our customers that have been with us for a while, we want to point out that the us/ prefix is retired. All usernames are prefixed with etv/ – even the old usernames.
If you do not know your username or password, no problem. Just click on the “I don’t know my username and/or password” button. You will be asked to specify the main email address on your account and a secure link specifying the username will be sent to your email. Save the username and click on the secure link. their you will be asked to reset the password. Then you will have the username and password so that you can login to the Customer Portal.
Customer Portal Fundamentals
View All Jobs
The View All Jobs provides the customer the ability to view summary and detailed information on messages that have been sent through EmailToVoice.Net. Specific date ranges or a specific job number can be specified.
My Details
Choosing the My Details section will provide the customer the ability to change password and fields within the customer’s account profile.
Some more commonly used fields for TTS (Text To Speech) are:
Timezone: You can select the most appropriate timezone. This is used for reports.
Additional Report Emails: You can specify an additional email address to receive the detailed email reports. These are the emails you receive in your main email address on your account every time a message is sent through your account.
Default TTS Voice: You can select a different voice from the list to be used for your messages. American English is the default.
TTS Message Prefix: You can raise or lower the speed of the voice. However, we recommend the default speed as set here.
Additionally you can also add a Header message to identify to the recipient who is calling. This Header Message is not repeated. For instance this field looks like this during the Free Trial. When a Trial Customer becomes a customer by providing their credit card on file, we remove the Header Message. This message also demonstrates the creative ways you can use punctuation to make your message sound good.
\speed=26 The following message, is being delivered to you! through, Email To Voice, messaging cloud service!
Email To Broadcast -Subject Field Behaviour: The Subject Name of the email is used as the EmailToVoice.Net Job name. However, you can choose to either concatenate the Subject Field to the message or have the Subject Field the entire message.
There are many other fields in the Details that are useful for TTS, SMS and FAX. We will save those for a subsequent post.
EmailToVoice.Net is Rich in Features
There are many features in EmailToVoice.Net. If you have a business process that requires communications, please reach out to us. We have a wealth of experience in enterprise communications and business process flow. We would love to share that experience and offer you solutions. If your not an EmailToVoice.Net customer yet, subscribe for a free trial.
When to Use EmailToVoice.Net
Why do our customers use EmailToVoice.Net? Phone calls and SMS messages get people’s attention when you need them to act on a critical event. When you send an email, it just does not get the necessary level of attention for important information. However, email is the typical mode of communication for alerts from the monitoring software, CRM or other business applications. EmailToVoice.Net makes it simple to make a phone call or send and SMS by just using the Email interface that is already available in the software systems.
How to Use EmailToVoice.Net
As a customer of EmailToVoice.Net, a phone call or SMS is sent by an application by just sending an email. The TO field looks something like 5551234567@TTS.message-service.org for a Text to Speech call or 5551234567@SMS.message-service.org for a SMS text message. (Calls made outside of the USA and Canada should have a + country code in front, like +61555123456@tts.message-service.org)
For a voice call, the text in the email is converted to a nice sounding voice (TTS – Text-to-Speech). If the recipient answers, they will hear the message right away. If they do not answer, the message will be left on their voice mail system. You can even leave a different message if the call goes to voicemail. There are many mission-critical features in our service.
We deliver Text To Speech messages, prerecorded voice messages, SMS text message, and even Faxes, with no need to install special APIs, hardware or software.
by Denis ONeil | Jan 20, 2020 | How To
As a customer of EmailToVoice.Net, you may want to check the status of a message that was sent through EmailToVoice.Net. This is easy for you to do. You need to merely do a Search from inside the email mailbox of the email address that receives reports from EmailToVoice.Net. This will provide you detailed status of any job.
The reason this is available to you is because EmailToVoice.Net sends a detailed Job Success Report back to the main email address on the account, plus any additional email addresses added to account upon request. So, there is a detailed success report residing in the main email address specified on your EmailToVoice.Net account. A Job Success Report exists for each message sent through EmailToVoice.Net. Many customers set a Filter in the email mailbox so these detailed Job Success Reports are put in a special folder.
Example of Locating Job Success Reports
Therefore, to locate a past Job Success Report showing the detailed status of a job, merely sign into the email address that is designated as the the main email address in your EmailToVoice.Net account. Then you can do a Search to find the job’s detail. Below is an example for GMAIL.
Step 1: In the Email Search box, click on the Down Arrow to open. This will open advanced search capabilities.
Step 2: In the Search Box, enter Search criteria. In the Subject Field, enter “job report: Success “. Then in the ‘Has the words’ field, you can enter other search criteria, such as the phone number.
That’s it. You will see email search results showing the Job Success Reports matching your search criteria. You will be able to see things in the detailed reports such as:
- Was the job successful or is there an error code.
- Did the call go to Voicemail
- What was the cost to send the message
- And much more…
Alternative Use of Job Success Reports
Another good use of these Job Success Reports is to automatically take action if a certain result occurs. For instance, if a call goes to Voicemail, then another job can be initiated for sending the message to a different phone number, SMS or email address. This can be done using Microsoft Flow or other like services.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us.
by Denis ONeil | Sep 25, 2019 | How To
Using Microsoft Flow with EmailToVoice.Net answers the challenge of sending phone alerts from a general-purpose email address. EmailToVoice.Net can send voice phone calls as alerts from any Monitoring Service or application. A phone call is necessary when the alert is urgent. Or, when it is not appropriate to send a text or email to the person needing the information. This is the case if the person is in a vehicle or traveling, for instance.
EmailToVoice.Net converts the content of an Email to a nice sounding voice and calls a phone number. This is possible with no need to install special APIs, hardware or software. So, EmailToVoice.Net works well with Monitoring Services when a phone call is needed, rather than just an email.
Most of the time, a Monitoring Service will send the email from a customer assigned unique email address. If this is the case, a customer can merely set the Monitoring System’s email address as a Send-Only email address in their EmailToVoice.Net account.
The Challenge of a General Purpose Email Address
Sometimes, however, the Monitoring Service sends the email from a general purpose email address, which is the same for all of the Monitoring Service customers. For strict security purposes, EmailToVoice.Net restricts messages to come from only an authorized customer-owned email address. The customer of EmailToVoice.Net must have the exclusive rights to sign-in to this authorized email address. You can learn more from this short How-To video.
So, what is the solution to the dilemma of needing to make a phone call from a general purpose email monitoring service.
One solution is to use Microsoft Flow with EmailToVoice.Net. Following is an example of steps to set up a Microsoft Flow that will accept the alert from the Monitoring Service from a general purpose email address into the customer-owned email address that is authorized to send messages to EmailToVoice.Net. When Microsoft Flow detects an arriving alert message into the customer’s email, Microsoft Flow will trigger an email to be sent from the customer’s email (forwarded) to the EmailToVoice.Net with the same alert message generated by the Monitoring Service.
The setup is straight forward, as is shown below. The steps used in this example are using the Microsoft Flow features of the free Web-based product. Here are the different pricing plans for Microsoft Flow.
Acquire Microsoft Flow
If your company does not have a license for Microsoft Flow, then sign up for a free Microsoft Flow account. When signing up for the service use the email address that will receive the alert and is authorized by EmailToVoice.Net to be able to send messages through EmailToVoice.Net. Or, when you setup your connectors use the email address authorized by EmailToVoice.Net. For the USA, the URL is https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/
NOTE: This is merely an example that uses Gmail connectors and fictitious destinations. The purpose of these steps is merely to give you an idea of how to setup your Microsoft Flow. Contact Microsoft to learn how to meet your specific requirements using Microsoft Flow or Contact Us at EmailToVoice.Net. We will help to the best of our ability.
Go to Connectors and connect to Gmail
Select Trigger
When a new email comes into your email mailbox from the Monitoring Service, Microsoft Flow will be triggered. Choose the “Forward Gmails that meet a certain criteria” action for this example. But there are many templates and you can also just choose to create your own without using a template.
Assure Microsoft Flow You Own the Email Account
Sign-in to the Gmail account that will receive the alerts that need to be forwarded to EmailToVoice.Net, as Flow requests.
Set the Flow
This is where you specify which emails are entering your email mailbox that are to be forwarded to the EmailToVoice.Net.
Set Flow Part 1
The From criteria specifies the email address from the Monitoring Service.
Set Flow Part 2
Set the SEND criteria. The TO field should be like: nnnnnnnnnn@TTS.MESSAGE-SERVICE.ORG For more information, refer to How Email to Voice Works
Conclusion
That is it. When a message comes in from the monitoring Service into your email address, a Microsoft Trigger will occur forwarding that message to EmailToVoice.Net from your email address. This handles the issue of a general purpose email address being used by a Monitoring Service needing to send messages through EmailToVoice.Net. EmailToVoice.Net will convert the content of the email to a nice sounding voice, dial the phone number, etc. Learn more at EmailToVoice.Net
Featured image : Patrick Amoy – Screen captures of Microsoft Flow
by Denis ONeil | Sep 24, 2018 | How To
A customer of EmailToVoice.Net can designate a special email address to be used only for sending messages through the service.
At the Start
When a new customer subscribes to a free trial, the customer’s objective is generally to understand how the service works. Once that is demonstrated, the customer begins to design the way the service will be implemented in a production state. As part of that design, the ability to have a designated send-only email address becomes useful.
Why Designate A Send Only Email Address
To be able to assign a designated send-only email address is useful. The email address does not need to have an email signature. It also will not receive any usage reports or billing information.
We can assign an additional email address to your subscription account that will be used only for sending emails through EmailToVoice.Net.
How to Designate a Send-Only Email Address
The way to get a send-only email address added to your account is to merely use the CONTACT US form on the Web Site and provide us the email address you want added to your account.
Special Consideration
There is one special considerations. The send-only email address must have the same domain as the domain of the Web Site specified during the subscription process and the email address used during the subscription process. All emails used in EmailToVoice.Net must have a business domain and must be owned by the company that subscribed to the EmailToVoice.Net service.
