Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!killer!texbell!uhnix1!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Voice Mail
Message-ID: <3051@sugar.uu.net>
Date: 4 Dec 88 16:03:21 GMT
References: <3044@sugar.uu.net> <6030@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston, TX
Lines: 49

In article <6030@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>, paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Constantine A. LaPasha) writes:
> Sure we can do voice mail, but even with compression (mentioned above
> but removed in overzealous editing) - will voice mail cause a LARGE
> increase in net bandwidth problems?  Will the actual voice recording
> add anything to the mailing beyond the text rendition, especially
> considering the extra bandwidth required to move the stuff?  

Granted, voice mail has higher bandwidth requirements -- much higher.
I would not recommend people doing much voice mail on the net.  Within
the office, over the LAN, or from your house to my house, however, I
think it could be valid.  Including voice messages on disks along with
other stuff would be another possible use.  A 6K/sec sample rate is adequate,
for sure, because I've tried it.  Perhaps five would be OK.  Anyway, 8 bits per
sample, Fibonacci delta compression reduces that to four.  (I have a variant 
of Fib I call "Wraparound Fibonacci delta compression" that reduces 
compression-induced distortion while maintaining the 50% compression rate.
Email for details if you can't figure it out from the name.)  OK, so that's
3K bytes/second using a not-super-bright compression algorithm.  For a
fifteen second message that's 45K bytes, about 3 minutes at 2400 baud, but
less than a minute at 9600, half a minute on a Trailblazer and maybe 1/10
second on a LAN.

The idea is, though, that voice mail is supposed to be one of the super-hot
new features of the Next (I'm going to stop auto-advertising it by typing the
name as NeXT) yet an Amiga can be outfitted to do it for about $75 for the
digitizer plus a modem, bringing the entry-level Amiga voicemail system in
for about one tenth the price of a Next.  (a smiley goes here, they're not
the same I know, the Next is awesome, but it's mono, it's not realtime, you 
can't buy one, and newly announced Amiga hardware is giving the Amiga many of 
the same capabilities)

>Maybe we should add video mail (:-) ... anim files of digitized
>sequences...  nah, I'm not sure if I could handle looking at this
>bunch (:-).

This is actually a pretty great idea!  It would be nice to have an easy
means of tagging ILBM's into mail messages.  There's this expensive
Mitsubishi video phone at Sharper Image that lets you transmit an image
of yourself.  You press a button, it digitizes a pretty low res mono
image of you and modems it across your voice connection for a few seconds.
They can print too.  This is kind of the uucp equivalent, plus it's what
the user interface should look like.  Of course you usually wouldn't send an 
ANIM that went along with your voice -- most Ami video digitizers don't run
that fast.  But you could send a little ILBM of yourself when appropriate.
And people complain about long .signatures now! :-)
-- 
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