Relay phone number for leaving captioned messages

Happinesscounts,

One of the new features slated for NexTalk's ACCESS platform will resolve this for you. I have seen many people on this forum complain about the challenges of hearing people using Relay to send and receive calls. A common complaint is that the hearing person hangs up because they don't understand the relay process. The best case scenario would be for the call to be as normal and unusual as possible.

When a person subscribes to the ACCESS communication platform, we give them a local telephone number to be used with the software. Today, that number is used for receiving TTY calls. However, the other reason we wanted to issue local numbers is because we want the deaf person to be able to use that number with hearing people as well.

So this is how it does/will work:

  1. When a deaf person subscribes to the ACCESS communication platform, they are given a local telephone number. This number can also be used by both a deaf and a hearing person to call you.
  2. If a deaf person is calling you:
    1. The Deaf person would initiate the call from another TTY device.
    2. The ACCESS platform recognizes the Baudot tones from that TTY device and automatically routes the call accordingly.
    3. If you are available to take the TTY call, you will open a dialog panel window and start the communication.
    4. If you are unavailable to take the TTY call, the caller is given the option of leaving you a message (which in this case would be a TTY (text) message)
    5. That TTY message is saved in your inbox
    6. All of the above is available today (everything below will be available in the near future)
  3. If a hearing person is calling you:,
    1. During the set-up process, you are able to create an outgoing message for hearing callers (i.e. Hi...you have reached Gary, I am unavailable right now to take your call, please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Just a reminder... I am deaf....but no worries....my communication software will convert your spoken message to text, so rest assured I will get your message. Thanks for calling).
    2. When a hearing person calls, ACCESS performs a test to determine if the caller is calling from a TTY device or from a voice phone.
    3. If ACCESS determines it is a TTY device, then the process above would be followed.
    4. If ACCESS determines that it is a voice phone, then the outgoing message script which you created gets played for the caller.
    5. After hearing the outgoing message script, the hearing caller would leave a voice mail, just as they normally do.
    6. The ACCESS communication platform then uses a speech-to-text engine to convert the spoken message to text and leave it as a text message in your inbox. No third party operator or relay agents would be involved.
This allows you to provide a single telephone number to anyone, hearing or deaf, something that you have never been able to do in the past. Further down the line, we will make that number usable for video calls as well.

Thanks
Gary Tanner
CEO
NexTalk, Inc.
 
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