Lucent's Octel for Microsoft Exchange
P. Hayes - November 1, 1999

Product Background

Lucent Technologies Octel Unified Messenger allows a user, residing on a Microsoft Exchange Server, to access voice mail, e-mail and fax through a single interface. A user can either retrieve his/her messages from a standard touch-tone telephone, or from multi-media enhanced laptops or workstations. The unified messenger uses a text-to-speech conversion engine for transmitting e-mails over a telephone line; the system will also notify the user if an attachment is contained within the e-mail. Retrieving faxes via a telephone line is different. The user must forward the fax directly to a machine where the user can manually retrieve a copy. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology needs to improve to the point that faxes are accurately processed for export to the text-to-speech engine...