File: EP3.bravo
By: L. Stewart
Date: June 8, 1981 5:17 PM

I. What can we do with audio anyway? We understand that some of these ideas may be sociological mistakes, intruding on privacy or making it too easy to wall ourselves off from the world.

This is a rambling list of functions.

One of the most noteworthy things about the list below is that most of them are connected with extended use of the telephone. The number of functions we get by building a purely workstation audio based system is small.

1. Telephony

Placement of otherwise ordinary phone calls. If our digital information environment is connected to the national phone system somehow, ove even to the company phone system, we can use our information management abilities to help us place calls. A data base can help translate a persons name into a phone number. One could reply to a Laurel message by selecting ``call back’’ and placing a phone call to the originator. One can keep a personal phone directory on-line (or the company phone directory!). Value added functions such as ``speed calling’’ of a limited set of numbers are possible, as are ``redial the last number I called’’ and ``keep trying until it isn’t busy’’.

Better control over the system. We could direct the phone system to forward our calls to where we are without having to plan ahead. We could have individual control over the number of rings before a call was forwarded to to the attendant’s console. Conference calls would be easy.

Putting the user back in control. For arriving calls, the user would have better control over who gets through. It would be possible to set one’s phone to accept calls from certain parties only, or certain groups, or to hold all calls until 1 o’clock.

We can build paging and intercom systems.

2. Telephony plus voice-as-data

We could have personal answering machines for everyone, with different announcements or behavior depending on the called party. The caller could push a button to leave a messge or not, after any number of rings.

3. Integrated systems, plus voice-as-data

Our answering machines could construct Laurel messages with text data&time and calling party (for inside calls, the calling number is available), plus an icon to play back the message.

Voice messages become easy.

We could easily annotate messages and documents.

We could provide many audio services such as the hourly news, weather, etc.

If a number is busy, the system could construct a Laurel form for the caller to use.