Setting up the service

You will use the Surf-By-Tel administration website to register your own website, giving some useful information like who you are, the address of your website and some configuration options.

Once your site is registered, you will receive a specific telephone number which will connect callers to your website. You can then advertise this number on your literature as an "Information line", "Care line", "Order line", "Booking line" etc. depending on how you intend to use it.

Accessing information

When your customer calls the appropriate number, this call connects them to the Surf-By-Tel gateway, which creates a link to your website. Data at your site, encoded in standard HTML, is accessed and retrieved. The text to speech element then converts it to speech, which is sent down the telephone to provide the information required by the caller.

If a page has hyperlinks to further information, these will be presented as choices to the caller, the speech recognition engine will interpret what the caller asks for and the new web page will be accessed and read out.

If a page contains a form, the caller will be prompted for the information to fill in the gaps. The advanced speech recognition engine will recognise what the caller says and they will be able to submit the information. In this way, ordering or booking can be automated, or specific information such as timetables or sports scores can be requested.