Interpage Network Services InterTalk

Why would I use InterTalk?

1. Situation: You receive a page on your alpha or numeric beeper. You are expecting important e-mail, and you want to be able to know the contents of the entire message. Your alpha beeper is currently configured to allow only 100 characters of text (to save on pager "overpage" charges, among other reasons), so you end up missing the important part of the message.

   Solution: You call into Interpage's InterTalk voice/phone response system, and have your e-mail read to you over the phone. You may play it back a number of times and take notes or write down names and phone numbers which were in the "important" section of the e-mail message.

2. Situation: You have a numeric pager. You receive new e-mail, and you are subsequently paged by us. From the "coded message" we send to you on your numeric pager, you can tell it is from an important business contact, so you want to have the message made available to you as quickly as possible. You call into InterTalk, as above, but the e-mail is filled with figures and tabular data, making it hard to decipher by simply listening to it. You aren't near a terminal, but there are plenty of fax machines nearby.

   Solution: You can call into Interpage's InterTalk system, and have the entire e-mail message sent to a nearby fax instantly, where you can review the e-mail in detail.

3. Situation: You have an alpha pager. You receive new e-mail. It is an interesting and timely message that you feel a few others will be interested in, yet you are driving and stuck in traffic and won't get to a terminal until everyone else has left work for the day or just won't be around.

   Solution: Dial up InterTalk, and forward your e-mail to the people who you feel will be interested in your message, right from your carphone. You may even do this regularly to utilize driving time as a way to forward important mail to the proper recipients.

4. Situation: You are going into a meeting, and you don't want to be paged with e-mail, but you do want to have your pager "on" for a few potentially important clients who expect an immediate response.

   Solution: Call InterTalk and quickly turn "Page Holding" on for a few hours, until the meeting ends. If the meeting ends early, just call in again, and turn "Page Holding" off, and your subsequent e-mail will be paged to you.

5. Situation: You travel from city to city, frequently on short notice. You don't always have your laptop with you, but you do carry a pager. You want to have your e-mail sent to your hotel automatically, and you'd like to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow.

   Solution: Call into InterTalk, and enter the telephone number of where you want your e-mail faxed to you. E-Mail will continue to "follow" you to the new number until you call in and turn fax forwarding off. While on InterTalk, set the weather forecast page to provide the forecast for the city which you are currently in.

How do I use the InterTalk server?

1. You will be paged with a special 6-digit code when new mail arrives. This code will be a unique ID to a given piece of e-mail which you receive, which only YOU may listen to. We have turned this code notification on for all current customers. If you do not wish to receive this code on your pager, telnet to "interpage.net", enter your account name and password, select the pager settings option, and disable the message ID/code feature. Note that if you do this, you will not be able to instruct InterTalk to read back your mail (or exercise other treatments). The code is necessary for InterTalk to read back the proper file.

2. If you feel you want to hear the corresponding message, forward it to someone else, and/or fax it to yourself and/or others, the Intertalk server at the number indicated on your Welcome Package.

3. After InterTalk answers, it will prompt you to enter your user ID. Just type it in using the digits on your touch tone phone which correspond to the letters in your user id. Thus, the user "doug@interpage.net" has a user id of "doug", and to access the InterTalk system, Doug would enter "3684" (3=D, 6=O, 8=U, 4=G). If your name has a "q" or "z" in it, use "1". Afterwards, InterTalk will prompt you for a password, which you should enter in the same way.

4. After entering your ID and password, you will be placed in the main menu. From the main menu, InterTalk will currently offer you these options: Page Holding, Message Options, Fax Forwarding, and Weather Forwarding.

If you select message options, you will be able to hear the header of the message, the body of the message; you will be able to forward the message to someone else, and you will able to fax it.

If you choose to listen to the body or the header of the message, InterTalk will synthesize the message for you. During playback, you can press "1" to listen to the previous line of text, press "3" to listen to the next line of text, or press "2" to repeat the currently playing line of test.

You may also forward the message to any other e-mail account. Since you do not have a keyboard to type in the correct e-mail account where you want to forward the message to, InterTalk will allow you to use two-digit touch tone codes (much like those numeric pager owners receive to tell them the name of a sender) to tell it where to forward mail to. A description of these codes follows immediately after this section.

Finally, you may also forward the message to any fax machine worldwide. Interpage will prompt you for a fax number, and you may enter a 10-digit US/Canada telephone number, or an International number preceded by 011. InterTalk will then ask you for a "name" for the cover page, after which you may enter a name using two digit touch tone codes, or have your OWN name appear on the cover sheet by pressing the "#" key.

If you select Fax Forwarding, InterTalk will prompt you for the new number to forward your mail to, and then read it back to you for confirmation. To turn Fax Forwarding off, follow the prompts at the Fax Forwarding menu.

If you select Weather Forwarding, you will be asked to enter the city or cities for which you will need weather, followed by the time(s) that you wish to be paged with the forecast(s). To turn Weather Forwarding off, follow the prompts at the Weather forwarding menu, and you will only be paged with your previously set city(ies).

Touch Tone Codes

Thus, if you want to forward your mail to another user, or to direct a fax to someone, you will need to enter their e-mail address and/or name. To do that from a touch tone phone, you will need to use these codes:

00,10,20, 30,....90= The numbers 0, 1, 2, 3,...9

19, 29, 39, .....99= The characters ABOVE the numbers on a keyboard, ie, the characters you will get if you hit "SHIFT" and a number at the same time. Thus, for example, 29="@", 79="&", etc.

01= "space", 02=".", 03=,", 04="?", 05="/", 06="+", 07="=",08="-", 09=")"

11=q, 12=z, 14=Q, 15=Z, 19=!

The rest of the letters are represented by entering the number key which the letter is on, followed by the position which the letter is in on that key.

For example, "a" is located on the "2" key. If you look at the "2" key, you will see "ABC". Since "a" is the first letter, the code for "a" is "21". The code for "b" would be "22", and "c" would be "23."

Now if you want to create the same letters but in UPPER case, you would use 4, 5, and 6 (instead of 1,2 or 3) to designate which letter position on a key to use.Thus, a lower case "a" is "21", while an upper case "A" is "24". A lower case "x" would be "92", and upper case "X" would be "94"., etc.

Here is the entire list, in tabular form:

Costs

Comments

We want to create a generic set of replies, such as "I'll be back in the office shortly, and will e-mail you from there", or "Please call me at my carphone", etc., which users will be able to use in order send mail or reply to another e-mail user, without having to enter the text manually.

What messages would you like to see available? How would you word them? What content would you like to see in them?

Any suggestions would be appreciated so that we can implement a series of generic e-mail responses which users can utilize at their convenience and when needed.

Thank you!

Last modified 12/8/97