parse Archives

Most Common Advanced Features in EmailToVoice.Net

by Denis ONeil | Jun 16, 2022 | Customer Portal, Escalation Lists, Product Feature

Below are the most common features used by customers of EmailToVoice.Net. When a new customer subscribes to EmailToVoice.Net, they can immediately send voice phone calls or SMS alert messages from their monitoring software or any business application. However, EmailToVoice.Net is rich in advanced features that are very useful to the customer.

Can I add an additional email address just for sending messages?

Being 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. All reporting will continue to go to the main email address on the EmailToVoice.Net account. This send-only email address may be an email address used specifically by the company’s monitoring software.

We can assign an additional email address to your subscription account that will be used only for sending emails through EmailToVoice.Net. 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 with the email address you want to be added to your account.

There is one special consideration. The send-only email address must be exclusively owned by your customer. 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. This is to protect the customer from being erroneously charged for messages generated by another company.

The Customer Portal

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.

EmailToVoice.Net Customer Portal Login

UserName and Password

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. There you will be asked to reset the password. Then you will have the username and password so that you can log in to the Customer Portal.

EmailToVoice.Net View All Jobs

How can I see job costs?

The “View All Jobs” menu item will provide the customer job costs, total period costs, and other detailed information for messages that have been sent through EmailToVoice.Net. Specific date ranges or a specific job number can be specified. Cost totals and other totals will be displayed at the bottom of the display of the jobs that met the date filter. This is a way for the customer to look back in history to see costs and other specifics about each job.

Can I have only the important part of the message converted to Voice or SMS? (Parse the message)

You can parse the email message by specifying where the important part of the text starts and ends. This eliminates the irrelevant parts of your email, such as images, the top Header part, and the bottom of the email, such as the Signature, leaving only the important part of the message. Set these parameters in the Customer Portal / My Details / Change Details. It is great to keep the message short and more succinct.

Can I set a window of time for delivering the messages?

If you want to send alerts out to your staff as phone calls or SMS text messages only during a specific time of day, you can specify the times in Customer Portal / My Details / Change Details / Email To Broadcast: Active Window.

Can I have the sending number be from my company?

You can have the Caller ID for TTS and Voice messages be from a number that you own. Just Contact Us. We will schedule a short coordinated process to verify your phone number. Then your own company number can be the Caller ID for the TTS (Text to Speech) phone calls. We cannot guarantee that the Caller ID will display in all regions of the USA and globally because carriers throughout the US and the world have to meet varying regulations regarding Caller ID.

You can specify an SMS Sender ID number in Customer Portal / My Details / Change Details if the number being called is not in the USA or Canada. Within the USA and Canada, you will need to request a number (a Long Code) from us and we will update your account with that number. There will be a minimal monthly charge for that Long Code.

Can I send to multiple destinations?

There are several ways to send to more than one destination.

Multiple Destinations in the TO Field

Multiple destinations can be specified in the TO field by separating them with a “#”. IE;:
2145551234#2145551235#2145551236@tts.message-service.org
OR, multiple destinations can be entered as multiple full email addresses:
“2145551234@tts.message-service.org, 2145551235@tts.message-service.org”

NOTE: When stringing destinations in the TO field of the Email, there is a standard general length restriction of about 64 characters for the TO field.
NOTE: The type of messages, such as TTS or SMS, cannot be mixed in a single message.

Multiple Destinations in the Email Content

Multiple Destinations can be In the body of the message in the following format:
<Numbers>
2145551234
2145551235
2145551236
</Numbers>

NOTE: The destination phone numbers are included in the body of the message. So, the TO field should be: msg@tts.message-service.org

Multiple Destinations Using a Pre-Loaded List

Multiple Destinations can be through pre-setup lists by using the format:
<Lists>
First ListName
Second ListName
</Lists>

NOTE: These lists are created and loaded through the Customer Portal
NOTE: The TO field should be: msg@tts.message-service.org

Can I have a list of numbers called sequentially, such as in an escalation list?

The Escalation List feature would call the first contact in the list. If they do not listen to the message for at least 10 seconds, or do not reply in a positive fashion by pressing 1 in the phone’s Dialpad, then the second contact is called. And that continues until someone listens to the message, replies to accept the offer, or the List is exhausted.

In all instances, a status report of the message is logged on the Customer Portal under View All Jobs and an email status report is returned to the main email address on the account. Further Workflow processes can be executed using the email status report with a product such as Microsoft Power Automate.

To use this feature, you set up a new list (or edit an old one) in the Customer Portal and tick the box “This list is an escalation list”.

NOTE: You send your TTS message using this list in EmailToVoice.Net. For example,

send the email message TO dmy@tts.message-service.org
in the body of your message, include:
<Lists>*My New Escalation List Name*</Lists> (* * replace with your list name)

Can I have the subject field be part of the message?

The Subject field of the email coming into our service is always used as the Job Name for reporting purposes. However, sometimes the Subject Field has valuable information in it. So, you can choose to concatenate the Subject field to the message or have only the Subject field be the entire message. You specify this in Customer Portal / My Details / Change Details.

Can I have an SMS message deliver large amounts of formatted data?

An Aert text message sometimes needs to deliver a large amount of formatted data (HTML). This can be done by sending the email with the TO field as phonenumber@LinkInSMS.message-service.org. For instance, the formatted data may be the section of a user manual on how to perform the repair for the failed device.

Our ‘Enterprise SMS’ feature, which uses LinkInSMS, is explained in more detail in our post called “Sending Enterprise Text Using a Simple Email Interface “.

In Summary

There are many advanced features of EmailToVoice.Net. These are merely a few of them. We love to share our many years of experience in this industry and provide easy no-code solutions for your workflow communications needs. Do not hesitate to Contact Us.

Author

Director at EmailToVoice.Net: CISSP – Solutions Architect for Industrial IoT Alerts and Business Communications. LinkedIn

Easily Parse the Beginning and End of an Email To Voice Message

by Denis ONeil | Aug 17, 2020 | How To, Product Feature

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 Automate as 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.

Parse Email into a Phone Call Using Microsoft Flow and Workflow Definition Language

by Denis ONeil | May 22, 2020 | How To

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.

Using Microsoft Flow with EmailToVoice.Net to Improve Customer Service Business Processes

by Denis ONeil | May 12, 2020 | How To

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.

To set up the Microsoft Flow script, sign into your Microsoft 365 Account.

Images below are from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365 Updated versions may change the views.

Select All Apps

Microsoft 365 All Apps

Select Flow

Microsoft 365 Flow app

Go to Connectors and connect to Gmail

Gmail Connector Microsoft Flow

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.

Gmail Microsoft Flow Forward trigger

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

Create the Flow part two

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

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.

How to Check on the Success of a Job in EmailToVoice.Net

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.

« Older Entries