Governments Need an SMS Strategy
A couple months back, I posted about the importance of the telephone in citizen-to-government communications.
Despite the explosive growth in new ways of communicating, telephones remain enormously important in how people contact government for assistance. This is due in part to the increasing sophistication of cell phones and the continued penetration of cell phones into our daily lives.
So it should come as no real shock to learn from the most recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Foundation that over 70 percent of adult cell phone users actively send and receive SMS messages (SMS stands for Short Message Service, and SMS messages are commonly called “text messages”).
It stands to reason.
Cell phones are becoming increasingly pervasive, and even the most simplistic cell phones (including older phones using previous generations of cell phone technology) support text messaging.
Cell phones have moved beyond fashionable accessory and into the realm of life necessity – just as many adults have a cell phone as have a computer. Cell phones are now toted by more than four in five American adults (82%).
While nearly all adult users of the cell phone make phone calls, 72% of adults 18 and older with cell phones send and receive text messages, up from 58% of phone-owning adults who texted in December 2007.
Most carriers support some reasonable text messaging price plan, and more and more consumers are using text messages as a way to communicate with one another.
…[A]dults most often use text messaging to “just say hello and chat” with others. More than 4 in 5 (84%) text messaging adults send and receive texts just to say hello, and nearly half (49%) send these types of messages every day or more often. Text messaging adults are nearly as likely to use texts to report their location or check on someone else’s location as they are to say hello, with 79% of texters doing so, and nearly 2 in 5 (39%) saying they text to check in daily or more often.
This information presents an opportunity for governments to enhance communications with citizens and to create new avenues for self service.
While probably not a great fit for longer, more complex interactions, text messages are ideal for short, concise pieces of information that governments want to send to citizens. Some examples:
- A periodic reminder to file income or payroll taxes.
- A time and location sensitive notice about road construction or traffic congestion.
- A notification about inclement weather, or a travel advisory.
- An emergency notification about a law enforcement notice or a missing child alert (Amber Alert).
Each one of these examples (and many more) fit snugly into the existing usage paradigm for text messages by adult cell phone owners. But the information flow for text messages doesn’t have to be only one way (government to citizen). There are also numerous opportunities for citizen-initiated text messaging-based services.
For example, many cell phone owners can send a text message to a special short code maintained by their wireless carrier and receive information on their current minutes used, their current bill, previous bill and payment amounts, etc.
Governments that provide utility service might find a need to allow citizens to be able to inquire on their current monthly balance via text message (a process that would be simple to implement if a utility account holder’s cell number was associated with their account).
It’s easy to think of all types of convenient applications of “inbound” text messaging:
- Inquiring about the date of garbage or refuse pickup (especially after a holiday).
- Inquiring about the hours of operation of a municipal building or park.
- Inquiring about the next bus to arrive at a specific bus stop or transit station.
Given the importance of cell phones to our daily lives, and the increasing take up of services like text messaging, its clear that governments need to have an SMS strategy.
Ground Zero for Gov 2.0 Innovation: Texas?
While the eyes of the Gov 2.0 world tend to focus on big cities on both coasts (San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC), the “Lone Star” State has been doing some mighty cool things in the areas of open government data and tech innovation.
State Gov 2.0 Goodness
A recent overhaul of the Texas.gov web portal included a focus on open data sets and resulted in a selection as a finalist in the Center for Digital Government’s “Best of the Web” contest.
A new iPhone app has been developed for Texas.gov, and the team of developers behind it is looking to deploy applications on other mobile platforms as well.
In addition, a new application development contest (in the tradition of Apps for Democracy) looks to be getting queued up in Texas.
And while all of this is exciting stuff, it’s what is happening at the local government level in Texas that has the Gov 2.0 world buzzing.
Gov 2.0 Goes Local
On September 20th and 21st, people from across the Gov 2.0 spectrum descended on Manor, TX – population 1,204 – to discuss innovative approaches to the problems facing local governments. Tiny Manor is a heavyweight in the Gov 2.0 world, drawing attention from major IT publications and even the White House for its eagerness to employ new technologies and solutions to provide better service to its citizens.
I was pleased to represent Tele-Works at the Manor event, leading two panel discussions on using technology to field citizen service requests and publishing government data in open formats.
You can watch video from the session on managing citizen requests for service on ustream and view slides from the session on slideshare.
Overall, I was struck by one theme that continued to come up at this event – governments need more efficient ways to communicate and provide information to citizens. The citizen service panel went in depth into research that suggests that most people still prefer to communicate with their governments using the telephone, even those that have access to broadband Internet connections.
This is something we at Tele-Works have focused on for a long time.
Part of what will make it easier for local governments to implement more efficient solutions for communicating with citizens is leveraging the new generation of cloud-based communication platforms. These platforms can make it easy and cost effective to deploy sophisticated phone-based solutions for interacting with citizens.
As local governments in Texas and beyond look to innovate and enter the ever changing landscape of Gov 2.0, we at Tele-Works look forward to lending our expertise to helping them.
Are you with a local government that couldn’t make it to the event in Manor, TX earlier this week? Are you curious about how phone and text messaging solutions can make it easier and more efficient to communicate with citizens?
Give us a ring, we’d love to chat with you and identify ways that we can help.
Converting Headerless (VOX) audio files to WAV format
Some IVR systems (usually older ones) require audio files in VOX format. VOX audio files, unlike their WAV counterparts, are somewhat unique in that they are headerless. WAV files have a well defined structure which includes information stored in headers that describe the makeup of the file.
A common challenge faced when upgrading to a newer voice platform for IVR systems is converting older VOX files to WAV format. This tutorial will demonstrate how to batch convert VOX files to WAV format using the open source Sound eXchange toolkit. Sound eXchange (SoX) is a sound processing program that lets you convert audio files into different formats, add sound effects to audio files, mix multiple audio files together, and a bunch of other cool stuff.
SoX is a command line tool that will run on both Windows and Linux systems – after downloading it, navigate to the directory that holds your VOX audio files.
Convert an audio file from VOX to WAV using the following command:
>sox -t raw -r 8000 -c 1 -U -b myfile.vox myfile.wav
- The -t option tells SoX that the input file is raw (headerless) audio
- The -r option tells SoX the sample rate of the input file
- The -c option with a 1 tells SoX that the input file has one channel (mono)
- The -U option tells SoX that the data encoding is u-law
- The -b option tells SoX that the data size is in bytes
Once you understand how this command works, it’s easy to write scripts that can convert entire directories of audio files quickly and easily.
Governments Need an IVR Strategy
With the growth of social networks and advanced mobile devices, you might expect to see changes in the way that people communicate with their governments.
Consider for a moment the staggering growth of social networking sites like Twitter. Twitter has over 100 million current users and gets an average of 300,000 new users every day! Similar trends can be seen in the other big social networking service of the moment: Facebook. In addition, powerful new mobile devices are putting e-mail and text messaging capabilities in the hands of a growing number of people. So you might expect that the role of the ordinary telephone, a technology first invented over 130 years ago, in citizen interactions with government to be pretty minor. As it turns out, you’d be wrong.
Social media enthusiasts let out a big huzzah recently at the results of a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled Government Online. The report, like a similar one several years ago, looks at how citizens communicate and interact with their government. This study focused specifically on online contact with government, the use of social media to interact with government and citizen use of open government data.
For social media and open government proponents, the findings are exciting:
“Efforts by government agencies to post their data online are resonating with citizens. Fully 40% of online adults went online in the preceding year to access data and information about government (for instance, by looking up stimulus spending, political campaign contributions or the text of legislation).
Citizen interactions with government are moving beyond the website. Nearly one third (31%) of online adults use online platforms such as blogs, social networking sites, email, online video or text messaging to get government information.”
This is great stuff. It means that efforts to open up government data sets and provide them to citizens in easily consumable formats is starting to pay off. It also means that government takeup of social media tools is providing people with more options and more opportunities to connect with their government.
But perhaps the most important piece of information in this report is less obvious. Tucked into the introductory section, which many people probably jump right past to get to the findings, is this little nugget of information.
“As we found in our last survey of e-government in August 2003, telephone contact is the overall most preferred contact method when people have a problem, question or task involving the government. Currently, 35% of Americans say they prefer using the telephone in these circumstances, a figure that is relatively unchanged from the 38% who said so in 2003.”
That’s right. Most people prefer to contact their government using the plain old telephone – more than using a website, or sending an e-mail or even going to a government office in person. The granddaddy of communication technologies still outpaces all others when it comes to citizen interaction with government. And that preference hasn’t changed since the first tweet or since Facebook left the dorm room and went mainstream.
It proves what we at Tele-Works have known for a long time – phones matter.
This means that the centerpiece of any successful citizen-to-government (and government-to-citizen) communication strategy needs to have telephones at its core.
Governments need an IVR strategy.
Contact the government IVR experts at Tele-Works, and we’ll help you develop and deploy one.
How SIP Won the VoIP Protocol Wars
Ars Technia has started a very interesting series on the SIP VoIP Protocol that provides a nice follow up to our last protocol post on the Tele-Works blog.
Now that you understand the wild and wonderful world of VoIP protocols, head on over to Ars Technia and find out how SIP became king of the VoIP jungle.
One of the more interesting points made in this initial article on SIP is how its flexibility and extensibility have helped it elbow the old king of the VoIP jungle (looking in your direction H.323) out of the way:
SIP was not built solely as a replacement for the telephone system. It allows extensions, and it relies on them to provide additional services beyond just simple calls. For example, you can use SIP to maintain user status information in an IM client as well as to set up IM sessions. Another extension enables transferring a call to a third party, something that was simply not defined by the basic SIP specification. This is possible thanks to the fact that SIP provides the necessary basic constructs while limiting those constructs only when necessary. SIP defines the concept of “dialog,” which is a 2-way communication, but does not limit dialogs to calls. Two-way communication also includes setting your IM status and receiving your IM friends’ updates. Extensions can also easily define new request or response types and new headers when needed.
As personal communications continue to converge and the lines between different communication modalities get more and more blurry, SIP’s extensibility will continue to make it king of the VoIP protocol jungle. This is what makes SIP so important as a standard on which to build an IVR solution – IVR systems that use SIP can leverage all of its interoperability and flexibility benefits and have the additional benefit of being “future proof.” As SIP continues to advance, it will provide a host of new benefits for communications platforms and IVR systems built on it.
Additionally, if you want to dive into the technical details of SIP, Ars technia has already published a follow up (with more articles to come) on the SIP standard and how it works.
Summary and Recap of eComm 2010
A couple of weeks ago, myself and John Schott, Tele-Works President & CEO, went out to San Francisco for the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm). It was there that I had the opportunity to present to a very Read more…
Tele-Works Presenting at eComm in San Francisco
Tele-Works Senior Application Developer Mark Headd will be presenting at next week’s Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco. Each year eComm brings together top communication executives, innovators, professors, and developers to discuss “what’s next” in telecom, mobile, and Internet communications. Read more…
Case Study: In the cloud or on-premise…how hybrid IVR helps Harris Computer Systems serve utilities large and small
This post originally appeared on the Voxeo Talks blog. (03/08/10)
March 8th, 2010 by Kim Martin
A hybrid IVR platform is one that is available as a hosted/cloud-based solution and as an on-premise deployment. Just to be clear, we are not simply talking about two distinct offerings delivered by a single vendor. We mean one platform – offered two ways. Benefits include the ability to migrate between deployment models at any time or to take advantage of both deployment models at the same time — with no changes whatsoever to your applications. That’s exactly what our partner Tele-Works did to enable Harris Computer Systems to serve a diverse base of utility customers.
Become a Protocol Pro
When most people think about VoIP protocols, they typically only think of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP is one of the preeminent standards in the world of VoIP, but it is by no means the whole story. This post will cover the wide (and interesting) world of VoIP protocols. Read more…
Decoding VoIP Codecs
Anyone new to VoIP has probably heard the term “codecs” bandied about and wondered what all the fuss was over.
Codecs (so named because of their coding/decoding function) are used to convert an analog telephony signal into an encoded digital version that can be compressed into packets and sent over an IP network (like the Internet). Codecs lie at the very heart of how VoIP works, so having a general understanding of what they are and which ones to use is important when deploying a VoIP system. Read more…
