EmailToVoice.Net can send Two-Way SMS messages in either simple text or rich content by just using Email.
Business applications and monitoring software need to send critical alerts and rich communications through SMS. Often, a response is required to ensure the recipient received the message or trigger another workflow action. EmailToVoice.Net provides the ability to send an SMS by using the email capability within Monitoring Software, CRM, ERP, or any enterprise business application.
Additionally, the recipient can reply to the SMS and the replied message is sent back to the Customer Portal and a designated email address. The authorized individual can review the replies on the Customer Portal or review the responses in the designated email address, which is collecting the replies.
SMS Reply Handling
Because the replies are collected in a designated email mailbox, no code solutions such as Microsoft Power Automate (Flow) can be used to evaluate the replies and act upon them accordingly.
Microsoft Power Automate and EmailToVoice.Net work well together. Microsoft Automate has email connectors that enhance business flows. These email connectors can easily act upon emails being sent from EmailToVoice.Net, such as the replies from two-way SMS messages. EmailToVoice.Net and products such as Automate integrate SMS communications with enterprise business flows. When Microsoft Power Automate detects an email message arriving in the designated email address, it will trigger an action such as a database update and/or an email to be sent back through to EmailToVoice.Net that will then generate a phone call or SMS to other recipients.
Two-Way SMS
The SMS can be set to 2-Way by adding the tag “<TwoWay>” anywhere in the email. If this is set, then the user can reply to the SMS, and an email with the reply contents will be sent to the email address set in the customer’s account profile. The email address to receive the replies can be set in the Customer Portal / My Details.
Alternatively, the tag “<TwoWayReplyAddress>” can be put in the email message when the SMS is sent through EmailToVoice.Net to set a designated email address to receive the replies for this specific event.
Sender ID
For One-way SMS, you will see the same Sender ID each time an SMS is received through EmailToVoice.Net. In the case of a Two-Way SMS, the Sender ID number will be chosen from a pool of long-code numbers so that we can track the replies. However, you have the option to purchase a LongCode for a nominal monthly fee that is added to your monthly charges. Then the Sender ID number will be unique to your organization.
Text or Rich Communications
EmailToVoice.Net can send either a simple SMS text message from any email interface or a Rich Communications SMS message as a link to a hosted web page automatically inserted into the SMS.
Sending formatted text messages for industrial communications can be done easily with just a simple email interface using EmailToVoice.Net. SMS Messaging is a reliable means to get important information to employees or business partners immediately. However, the limitations of SMS text messaging often keep it from being used in mission-critical business processes. Text messaging is limited by the lack of formatting and low text character limit, which is necessary to convey detailed information. MMS and RCS attempt to address this issue. However, they too have limitations that cause barriers to wide adoption for mission-critical applications.
EmailToVoice.Net provides the ability to send formatted data to a cell phone using SMS from monitoring software or business applications. Messages with the formatting requirements of an HTML Web Page can be automatically sent to just about any cell phone in the world as easily as sending an email. EmailToVoice.Net uses the LinkInSMS service to provide Enterprise SMS to its customers.
Enterprise SMS is a feature of EmailToVoice.Net, which creates a custom HTML Web page from your business email alert and then delivers it as a simple SMS message. For each SMS recipient, a custom web page is created and inserted in their SMS text message, allowing viewing of the page of HTML with a simple tap. This allows a single text message to communicate large amounts of formatted data.
To send an Enterprise Text message,
the TO field merely needs to have the recipient’s phone number and specific email domain provided by EmailToVoice.Net.
Our cloud-based messaging service will convert the email content into a custom web page and insert the link of the automatically created Web page into the text message.
The recipient can then tap the link in the text message and see the entire email content formatted as a Web Page on their smartphone.
The Email Fields would look like this:
TO: 5551231234@linkinsms.message-service.org (The recipient’s cell phone – no preregistration required)
FROM: emailaddress@yourcompanydomain.com (Subscribed to EmailToVoice.Net)
SUBJECT: Anything (Used as a job name for reporting purposes)
The content of the email is converted to an HTML Web page. The Web page of data is hosted by our service and a link to the Web page is substituted into the outgoing SMS text message so that the recipient can easily view the data with a tap.
Features of Enterprise SMS
Enterprise SMS provided by EmailToVoice.Net is rich in features to meet any business requirement. Below are some examples of these features that can be set up in the Customer Details in the Customer Portal.
You can add a Header and a Footer that will be used in all text messages from your account. For example, you can add a logo, an introductory message, disclaimers, and links using HTML
You can specify a specific SMS Sender ID so the recipient can recognize the sender of the text message.
You can enter a default email address for SMS replies. So, if the recipient replies to the text message, the reply will go to this email address. You can then alternatively use Microsoft Power Automate to continue a complex business workflow process without any coding. (Contact us for assistance in developing workflow processes)
There are many more features of the Enterprise SMS Messaging feature in EmailToVoice.Net. Let us know if you would like to learn more. Contact us. We love to share our experience in industrial communications, workflow, and alerts.
Author
Director at EmailToVoice.Net: CISSP – Solutions Architect for Industrial IoT Alerts and Business Communications. LinkedIn
EmailToVoice.Net provides the user with the ability to set a window of time for the delivery of voice phone calls and SMS messages using any email interface.
This feature is extremely useful for departments that need their staff to be alerted by voice or SMS when they are off their primary working hours. When staff are at their desks, they may not need voice and SMS alerts. However, when the staff is not on their primary shifts, the messages must get the attention of the staff members. To get that attention, the messages should be delivered as a telephone call and/or SMS text message. Email is not an effective way to get the attention of essential support staff.
We created a user option so an active window of time can be designated for voice phone calls or SMS text messages to be delivered by EmailToVoice.Net.
Although setting a window of time for voice or SMS messages to be delivered can be accomplished by using no-code alternatives like Microsoft Power Automate, we provide this ability without the need for any third-party capability. The customer merely needs to sign-in to the Customer Portal and modify these parameters in the ‘My Details’ section.
Easily configure your delivery start time and end time
The parameters in Customer Portal / My Details provide the ability to block or allow the messages to go through. The parameters allow the user to set different rules for the Weekend (Saturday and Sunday) and the Weekdays (Monday through Friday). The time can either be blocked or allowed. The time is according to the timezone set in the account under My Details.
If you have any questions about this feature of EmailToVoice.Net, please contact us so we can help you meet your mission-critical business communications requirements.
We have recently added other features that assist our customers in adding workflow processes to their business communications needs. An example is designate the beginning and the end of a voice or text message sent using email. This is valuable when you want to send only the pertinent information in your alerts and mission-critical messages.
The customer can designate the beginning and end of all messages by logging into the Customer Portal and then going to My Details / Change My Details. The fields in the account details are
Email to Broadcast-Start of Message Text:
Email to Broadcast-End of Message Text:
How EmailtoVoice.Net works
EmailToVoice.Net is rich in features while being simple and effective to use for business communications and alerts. We transform an email message into a phone call or an SMS message with no need to program APIs or install any hardware or software.
For making a voice phone call, you merely make the TO field in the Email you are sending to look something like 5551234567@tts.message-service.org (international calls require a +CountryCode in front of the local number). The recipient will receive a call on their phone. The text in the email is converted to a nice-sounding voice. 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 voice mail.
You can also send an Enterprise SMS, FAX or prerecorded Voice Message from an email program interface, like from an application, Internet of Things device (IoT / M2M), or through your CRM and Dispatch System.
Contact Us if we can provide further assistance in helping you meet your business communications requirements.
EmailToVoice.Net has the ability to designate the beginning and the end of a voice or text message sent using email. This is valuable when you want to send only the pertinent information in your alerts and mission-critical messages.
Send Voice and Text via Email
EmailToVoice.Net provides the ability to make a phone call or send an enterprise text message by merely using any email capability. This is a requirement for mission-critical processes in many industries. Our customers can send alerts directly from monitoring software, like Vaisala/viewLinc, ServiceNow, Nagios, SolarWinds, and more. If the alert message is concise and complete, then the complete message can be converted and delivered to the recipient as a voice phone call or text message without change.
However, there are situations when our customer has information in the content of the email that does not need to be converted to a voice message (TTS) or SMS message.
Examples When Email Parsing Is Desired
Food Delivery Services
A person may order food from a web site which creates a Delivery Order form. That Order form may need to be sent to the delivery person or the restaurant via a voice phone call or a text message. The Delivery Order form will often have information that does not need to be converted to voice or a text message. EmailToVoice.Net allows our customers to specify, at the account level, the characters that designate the beginning and the end of the message that needs to be delivered by voice or text message.
Industrial Device Alerts
Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) devices are generally out in the field. When a monitoring service detects a failure or scheduled maintenance, an alert is sent to the Service department. The alert can also be sent directly to the Field Repair person. The alert may contain information that does not need to be converted. Our customers can merely specify the characters that identify the beginning and the end of an alert message that needs to be converted to voice or text.
Important Email Messages
Emails do not always get the attention that is required for important messages. Most of us are overloaded with email messages. So, to get people’s attention, companies will send a voice phone call or text SMS message. However, the original email will often times have an Email Signature that is not necessary for other forms of communication. Or sometimes the email is forwarded and that creates extra header information that does not need to be converted to voice or text. EmailToVoice.Net provides the ability for our enterprise customers to eliminate the top and bottom portion of the email before conversion to voice or text occurs. Then when the message is played over the phone, only the important part of the message is heard by the recipient. The same occurs for the person receiving the important Email message in text across the SMS channel.
The above three examples are only a few of many where this feature of EmailToVoice is so valuable. The recipient of alerts and other mission-critical information should be hearing or reading only that which is of the utmost importance.
How To Enter the Beginning and End of a Message
Change My Details Account Information
The customer can designate the beginning and end of all messages by logging into the Customer Portal and then going to My Details / Change My Details. The fields in the account details are
Email to Broadcast-Start of Message Text:
Email to Broadcast-End of Message Text:
There is an additional capability that is extremely useful. The customer can specify if the text designated as the Start of the Message is to be included in the text of the outgoing message. This is a checkbox. See the Customer’s “My Details” section below:
Enter Tags into the Message
You can also enter the “Begin Message” and “End Message” tags directly into the email message to control what is converted to voice or text.
Start message indicators
Instead of starting the outgoing message content at the beginning of the email, there are methods of skipping the start of the email and starting the relevant message further
down.
1. A line containing just the tag “<Begin Message>” can be included in the email, and the
outgoing content will start on the line AFTER this.
2. If the user has the option “Start of message text” set, then the outgoing content will
start where this text is found (including the text itself) End message indicators
The end of a text message to be sent can be indicated in a number of ways:
1. A line containing just the tag “<End Message>” can be included in the message.
2. A blank line followed by “– ” (two plain ascii dashes and a space) which must then be on
a line by itself
3. Four empty lines
4. The text entered in the users “End of Message Text” configuration field
Alternatives for More Detailed Parsing
Our customers can choose to do more elaborate parsing of the email before sending the message through our service for conversion to voice or text. There are many Email Parsing services available. In the past, we have written about Microsoft’s Power Automateas one example. These email parsing services provide the customer with the ability to extract and reformat information before being sent through our Email to phone call cloud service for conversion and delivery.
Let Us Help
EmailToVoice.Net is rich in features while being simple and effective to use for business communications and alerts. We transform an email message into a phone call or enterprise Text Message with no need to program APIs or install any hardware or software. You can send a voice phone call (TTS), Enterprise Text SMS, FAX or prerecorded Voice Message from any email program interface through your monitoring software, CRM, or Dispatch System. Contact Us and let us assist you in meeting your mission-critical business communications needs.
Making a phone call has become a critical requirement for alerts and notifications from monitoring systems and customer service applications. The challenge is these applications often can only send emails. In addition to that challenge, an email has a lot of stuff that is not necessary for a phone message. The solution for this challenge is to parse the content of the email into a succinct voice message that gets the important message across quickly and effectively.
Microsoft Flow and EmailToVoice.Net work well together. We have written about this integration in past articles in our Blog. In this post, we are going to delve deeper into the script used to parse the email content into a sensible phone message.
Workflow Definition Language
The Microsoft Workflow Definition language is at the center of extracting relevant information from an email and passing only what is applicable to a voice phone call. The Microsoft Workflow Definition Language is available in Microsoft Flow. You also find this powerful language in Azure Logic Apps. Actually it is better documented in Azure Logic Apps.
Sample Script for Parsing and Email
In our previous posts about using Microsoft Flow with EmailToVoice.Net, we have shown sample scenarios of forwarding a message that arrives in a customer service email inbox and then passes that message on to a phone. In this post, we are showing a simple example of parsing the content of an email into shortened text that would be more applicable for a voice phone call.
Sample Incoming Email
Let’s use a simple email for our example. From this email, all we want for the phone call is what has been ordered. In this case, it is ‘One Pizza’.
Initialize Variable with the Body of the Email
First we will initialize a new variable with the content of the Email. This grabs all of the text of the incoming email. If the email is HTML, then all the HTML formatting is also present in this new variable.
Discard beginning text of the email
Next we want to discard all text before the part of the email that we want to have as the content of the voice phone call. To do this we used the following expression:
last(split(variables(‘Email Text’),’This is the order </div><div><br></div><div>’))
It is important to note that when the email is HTML, then you need to look into the source to see exactly how the email content looks.
Discard bottom part of the text of the email
Now we want to discard everything after the part of the email that we want to keep as the voice phone message. in this simple case, the only part we want to keep is ‘One Pizza’. To do this we used the following expression:
first(split(variables(‘Email top part’),'</div>’))
Pass the remaining content to a Phone Call
As the final step, we use the variable that now has only the part of the email that we want to be converted to speech (TTS) for the phone call. This text will be passed to EmailToVoice.Net.
This is a great independent Youtube video to further explain this type of process using Workflow Definition Language.
Can We Help Further
If you have a business process that would be enhanced by using voice phone messages, contact us. We can help you integrate phone messages into any mission-critical business flow.
EmailToVoice.Net is rich in features while being simple and effective to use for business communications and alerts. We transform an email message into a phone call or an SMS message with no need to program APIs or install any hardware or software.
For making a voice phone call, you merely make the TO field in the Email you are sending to look something like 5551234567@tts.message-service.org (international calls require a +CountryCode in front of the local number). The recipient will receive a call on their phone. The text in the email is converted to a nice-sounding voice. 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 voice mail.
You can also send an SMS, FAX or prerecorded Voice Message from an email program interface, like from an application, Internet of Things device (IoT / M2M), or through your CRM and Dispatch System.
Microsoft Flow works well with EmailToVoice.Net. And now, Microsoft has made licensing changes that make Microsoft Flow even more convenient for routing and parsing emails while EmailToVoice.Net converts the emails into voice phone calls.
As recently announced by Microsoft, Office 365 is now Microsoft 365. Included in that change, Microsoft Flow is now available in most Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
Microsoft Flow and EmailToVoice.Net are great companions. Microsoft Flow has email connectors that enhance business flows. These email connectors can seamlessly invoke the abilities of EmailToVoice.Net. EmailToVoice.Net provides the ability to integrate Text to Speech and SMS communications with enterprise business flows.
Customer Service Scenario
To provide an example of how Microsoft Flow and EmailToVoice.Net can work together, the following is an example of sending a voice message to customer service staff when an email arrives from the enterprise’s customer. The prerequisites for this example are a subscription to EmailToVoice.Net (can be a free trial) and a paid subscription to Microsoft 365. This example uses the GMAIL connector. Microsoft Flow has many connectors.
When Microsoft Flow detects an email message arriving in the customer service general email address Microsoft Flow will trigger an email to be sent (forwarded) to EmailToVoice.Net that will then generate a phone call to the customer service representative.
Images below are from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365 Updated versions may change the views.
Select All Apps
Select Flow
Go to Connectors and connect to Gmail
Select Trigger
In this example, the trigger will be a new email coming into the customer service email mailbox from a customer.
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.
Provide Assurance to Microsoft Flow that 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 Microsoft Flow requests you to do.
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 customer service email address that will receive the customer’s email message.
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
When a message comes in from a customer to the customer service email address, a Microsoft Trigger will occur, which will forward that message to EmailToVoice.Net from your email address. EmailToVoice.Net will convert the content of the email to a nice sounding voice, dial the phone number, etc. Learn more at EmailToVoice.Net
Additional Considerations
The Subject Field of the message being forwarded to EmailToVoice.Net for conversion to a voice can be preset in Microsoft Flow. The Subject field can then be optionally read as part of the message to the customer service representative by selecting the following setting in the Customer Portal.
Customer Portal / My Details / Email To Broadcast Subject Field Behaviour
The number of characters of the email being sent to EmailToVoice.Net can optionally be limited by selecting the setting in the Customer Portal.
Customer Portal / My Details / TTS character limit
Additionally, a Header Message can optionally be set in the EmailToVoice.Net account for every message. The Header message will be converted to voice and read every time at the beginning of every voice message.
Customer Portal / My Details / TTS Message Prefix
How EmailtoVoice.Net works
EmailToVoice.Net is rich in features while being simple and effective to use for business communications and alerts. We transform an email message into a phone call or an SMS message with no need to program APIs or install any hardware or software.
For making a voice phone call, you merely make the TO field in the Email you are sending to look something like 5551234567@tts.message-service.org (international calls require a +CountryCode in front of the local number). The recipient will receive a call on their phone. The text in the email is converted to a nice-sounding voice. 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 voice mail.
You can also send an SMS, FAX or prerecorded Voice Message from an email program interface, like from an application, Internet of Things device (IoT / M2M), or through your CRM and Dispatch System.
Contact Us if we can provide further assistance in helping you meet your business communications requirements.
