Specifications

Voice Storage System
204 025-9035AA
If you watch the paging system as it is powered on, you will see the Voice Card reset
twice. This is normal. The first reset occurs when power is applied to all the cards. At this
point, the paging terminal software is not yet running, so the Voice Card may show some
rather random and harmless activity with its lights. The second reset happens after the
paging terminal software has started. The Voice Card is intentionally reset so that both the
Voice Card and the paging software start out in synchronization.
Record/Play
The lights on the Voice Card will display different information depending on which option
is selected by the Mode Switches (see below). However, the DMA light is always a
reliable indicator of record or play activity. Each time it blinks a voice buffer of audio data
has transferred either to or from the hard disk. If only one voice channel is active, you will
see the DMA light blink at a steady one-second rate as the audio buffers fill and get stored
to disk.
Silence Deletion
The Silence Deletion option will reduce the size of typical voice messages by removing
the long silent gaps between phrases. When the caller says nothing, nothing is recorded.
This not only speeds the playback - important over busy paging channels - but also takes
less space on the hard disk, leaving more room for other disk space intensive options such
as customer voice prompts.
The decision of whether or not to use Silence Deletion lies with the paging terminal
operator. It is easy to enable or disable, requiring only that a software file be changed (you
edit the
options.cus file), and it can even be changed in the middle of a recording. The
Voice Card removes the silent gaps so seamlessly that it can be difficult to tell, when
listening to the playback, where they went. Some clients will actually find the
intelligibility of the replayed messages to be improved because the long, annoying pauses
- common from first-time or timid callers - are no longer there. The major reason for using
Silence Deletion, however, is the reduction in voice airtime and message storage time.
Typical replayed compressed messages are 10% to 50% shorter than the original
messages. Finally, it nearly eliminates the annoying wrong number situations that end up
as twenty seconds of dead airtime.
Perhaps the only reasons to disable the Silence Deletion feature are:
• your paging system experiences only light traffic and channel air time is not at a
premium, or
• the nature of what your system is used for makes you uncomfortable with the idea
of any sort of “editing” of the message content
Note While Silence Deletion is useful for voice paging, it is not normally
used for voice messaging.