Voicemails land in inbox with playable audio + instant transcription
These days, you only need to step away from your desk for a few minutes to have a heap of missed calls and new emails awaiting your return:
What Voicemail to Email Does:
As the name suggests, a Voicemail to Email solution uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to automatically transcribe voicemails received by a user’s voice mailbox. Voicemail to Email is ideal for busy professionals who can’t be accessible at a moment’s notice, are often in meetings, or in an environment where it’s not feasible to listen to messages in sequential order. Voicemail to Email offers a practical, at-a-glance way to keep up with the messages that need your attention and prioritization. With Voicemail to Email transcription, you can consult your voice messages at a time and place that’s most convenient for you. Users can efficiently hone in on specific transcribed messages to find exactly the information they need – from contact information to payment details to an address for their next meeting.
What are the Benefits of Voicemail to Email?
Maximum Accuracy: Voicemail to Email solution uses Google’s Cloud Speech API for Speech to Text transcription which has better accuracy than many voice transcription solutions. The transcriptions made over our platform represent the truest content of your customers’ voicemails.
Efficiency and Flexibility: Users can read their Voicemail to Email transcriptions at their own convenience – via email, SMS, or a mobile app.
Flexible Billing: Users can choose between a flat rate per line ($4.95 per month) or choose to be billed per transcription ($0.14 per voicemail).
Future Features: We are looking to add Spanish Voicemail to Email transcription to our services in the future. We are also looking to add live call transcription, so that a user can have a complete text transcript of their phone calls in writing emailed to them.
If your company is looking to expand what their phone system can do for them, then contact us for assistance.
With the recent addition of VoIP phone service and internet phone service for current phone system owners, we here at Farmhouse Networking have decided to “eat our own dog food” as the saying goes by changing our phone number over to use the new VoIP phone system ourselves. So here is what to expect:
Phone System Features:
Texting: Those of you who are used to texting in for quick responses will no longer be able to do so. I will still have a cellphone and be able to answer calls from the field via the phone systems Ring Group feature, but I will changing the phone number for my cell phone.
Desk Phone: When in the office, we will be answering our Polycom VVX310 desk phone which has HD Voice for clearer call quality.
Messages: Any time a message is left on our new system, the phone system Voice to Text feature will transcribe the message automatically then send an email into our ticketing system with a copy of the audio also attached. This then becomes a ticket – this feature will increase responsiveness and accuracy in handling your requests.
Holidays, Nights, & Weekends: The phone system has been setup to recognize specified national holidays, birthdays, and special occasions. It also has Time Frame setup with business hours between 9am and 5pm on all weekdays. When outside these business hours or on holidays the phone system will be answered by our Auto Attendant system. This will give the option to leave a voicemail to create a ticket or agree to after hours rates to start an emergency call. Please see our Terms & Conditions for more information.
Thanks for always looking to Farmhouse Networking to serve your company’s IT needs.
If your company is looking to upgrade your current phone system feature set or reduce overall costs of phone service, then contact us for assistance.
As small businesses change and grow, the ability to quickly scale up — or down — becomes a necessity. Adding new employees, for example, requires the company to adapt its phone system to accommodate the need for more lines.
That is harder to accomplish using traditional on-premise telephony systems due to higher setup and maintenance costs, the need for hardware on-site and reliance on IT support. A cloud-based phone system, on the other hand, would enable small businesses to manage communication services in a less costly, more streamlined and agile manner.
Benefits of a Cloud-Based Phone System
1. Fully-Integrated Communications System
Business tools that operate in the cloud are easy to deploy, enabling employees to stay connected whether they are in the office or on the go. In this way, the cloud provides a consistent business presence and helps to increase productivity with seamless access to CRM tools, email, instant messaging, voice and videoconferencing.
2. Control Over Modes of Communication
A cloud-operated system puts businesses in the driver’s seat, allowing them to pick and choose what features they need, with access to turn them on or off easily. Also, cloud solutions give employees anytime, anywhere access via a smartphone, desk phone or softphone to all their calling features.
3. Top Line Business Features
A cloud-based phone system would give small businesses access to the types of network applications that one would typically find at larger corporations. These include features such as a Virtual Assistant, Auto Attendant, Never Miss a Call or Call Center solutions.
4. Mobility and Ease of Use
Today’s workplace is increasingly mobile, and small businesses especially need to be able to operate from multiple locations. With a cloud-based system, small business employees have access to features that allow them to log in from anywhere so that they can be reached while on the go, giving customer-facing and revenue-producing employees greater control over their productivity.
5. Time Management and Efficiency
Web-based customer portals enable IT staff to manage their system more efficiently. With insight into the installation, service configuration, trouble tickets, training, billing and call analytics, this full access to a customer’s system and account allows them to spend fewer resources on project management and focus more on work that adds to the bottom line.
6. Flexibility to Scale Up (and Down)
As a business grows, so does the need to hire new employees, open new offices and onboard new customers. This requires a communications system that can scale up — or down — as the need arises. With a cloud-based phone system, businesses can add as many extensions as they need to accommodate heightened call volume, or, if necessary, simply call in to deactivate these extra extensions. Unlike traditional systems, businesses only pay for the extensions they need for as long as they need them.
7. Business Continuity
Working with a phone system “in the cloud” allows businesses to remain connected to their customers no matter the environment. A cloud-based communications system is likely to be unaffected by outside factors such as severe weather or other issues that may keep employees from getting to the office.
8. Improved Customer Service
With the Virtual Receptionist (VR) or Auto Attendant feature, businesses can easily direct calls to various departments and even create greetings unique to a given department. For example, a business could set up a holiday greeting in advance (via the administrative portal) and pre-set it to revert to the non-holiday greeting on a specified date. It could also add an on-hold message about special promotions or commonly asked questions.
9. New Service Features Added Easily
During busy seasons, some businesses will add premium calling features to increase call-taking efficiency and maximize staffing. Call Groups, for example, allow incoming calls to ring on multiple extensions. Call Queues provide a “dynamic waiting room” for callers that let businesses customize the on-hold experience and better manage call volume. Both help to decrease voicemails, missed calls and busy signals, enabling service to as many callers as possible.
10. Cost Savings
Cost savings are another benefit of cloud-based phone system. Moving telecommunications off of PBX platforms and to the cloud can be less expensive relative to monthly service rates versus that of a traditional system, helping to reduce costs and, ultimately, increase profitability.
If your company is looking to reap the benefits of moving to the cloud, then contact us for assistance.
Cloud redundancy keeps phone systems operational during disasters
What happens to your phones when the power goes out, the internet is down, or the old copper lines are down from a natural disaster? Are your customers going to get a busy signal? How quickly will they call the competition?
Phone System Backup Plan
With a standard phone service there would be nothing to prevent the busy signal from happening. With phone service from Farmhouse Networking all calls have the ability to be automatically forwarded and routed to virtually any person, device, or location. Plus our platform includes connectivity to multiple carriers for redundancy purposes, so no single carrier issue will impact your business.
Disasters might not be under our control, but business can continue to happen even when they occur.
If your company is concerned about losing calls or looking to add the protection a cloud phone system provides, then contact us for assistance.
Farmhouse Networking has been looking into expanding the ways that we serve our customers. After having a major global Voice-over-IP provider reached out to us, taking a long look at their product offering, and looking at the current phone bills of a few of our clients – we have decided to resell their internet-based telephone services. So what does that mean for you:
Business Class Phones.
Our customers will get the option to purchase or lease VoIP phones from the top manufactures. These include options for wireless phones and cordless headsets.
Limitless Features.
All the features that you have come to expect from quality telephone service are here in our new hosted system and we are also able to provide telephone service to your existing on-premise phone systems. There are also some other exciting features to keep business running like cellphone fail-over if the power ever goes out again.
Simple Pricing.
After reviewing several phone bills from the local internet and telephone providers, Farmhouse Networking has developed a simplified pricing structure with all the usual features a business needs. It is based on the number of phone lines with unlimited minutes within the United States.
Get Started Today.
All we need is a copy of your current phone bill to start seeing if we can save you a bunch of money too. Send one now!
Stop asking “Is the internet down again?” with proactive network monitoring and root-cause analysis.
If it seems like this is a typical question in your office then there is hope. The concept of internet failover has been around for years. With the advent of 4G LTE cellular networks internet failover is now within reach of the small business. If the main internet connection goes down then the 4G LTE cellular network will kick in automatically to keep your business flowing. When the main internet connection comes back online it will automatically switch back to restore full speed access.
How We Fix the Internet
Business Class Router: The Datto Networking Appliance has all the specs of true business class router including all the usual services (DHCP, DNS, VLAN, DMZ, Access Rules, etc). It also has all the features that you need to secure and expand your business with seven layer deep packet inspection, intrusion detection, traffic shaping (VoIP), client VPN, site-to-site VPN, and cloud management.
Connectivity: This router has all the connectivity you could ever need. It has 4 Gigabit LAN ports to help physically segment the network. It has the latest and most redundant wireless connectivity available. It has a fully integrated multi-band 4G LTE wireless cellular modem to keep you connected when wired internet fails.
Peace of Mind: Leave the connectivity worries to us. Our expert team will be monitoring and maintaining the Datto Networking Appliance at all times via the cloud management console and integrated alerting. We will know the internet is down before you do and will take the steps needed to get your ISP to fix things.
If your company’s internet is constantly going down, then contact us for assistance.
It never occurred to me that analog fax was still something used, but my kids’ optometrist asked me to fax in a copy of their insurance card. So I asked them if I could email it to them and they said that it would not be HIPAA compliant to do so to which I responded that I could send them an encrypted email – they were not amused. This interaction begged the question is HIPAA compliant analog fax possible. According to Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) section HHS.gov site:
Does the HIPAA Privacy Rule permit a doctor, laboratory, or other health care provider to share patient health information for treatment purposes by fax, e-mail, or over the phone?
Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows covered health care providers to share protected health information for treatment purposes without patient authorization, as long as they use reasonable safeguards when doing so. These treatment communications may occur orally or in writing, by phone, fax, e-mail, or otherwise.
The Privacy Rule requires that covered health care providers apply reasonable safeguards when making these communications to protect the information from inappropriate use or disclosure. These safeguards may vary depending on the mode of communication used. For example, when faxing protected health information to a telephone number that is not regularly used, a reasonable safeguard may involve a provider first confirming the fax number with the intended recipient. Similarly, a covered entity may pre-program frequently used numbers directly into the fax machine to avoid misdirecting the information. When discussing patient health information orally with another provider in proximity of others, a doctor may be able to reasonably safeguard the information by lowering his or her voice.
So the short answer is a surprising yes they can do HIPAA compliant analog fax with a standard old facsimile machine with the numbers pre-programmed in. If they have moved on the digital fax technology then similar safeguards to email must be put in place for the storage and transmission of that data.
Recently ran into an issue where a company wanted to use multiple types of VoIP phones that required seperate settings to download their configuration with a vendor – this is usually done in a homogeneous environment via DHCP option 66 settings. (Option 66 is part of IETF RFC 2132 which states that this option uses FQDN or IP address to point to a TFTP server.) In this particular setup only one VoIP phone vendor at a time could be specified in the option 66, so custom settings were going to be needed to make all the other vendors phones work properly. Found that this could be done via DHCP reservation on either their Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard or on their Cisco 871w router, but I am sure their are ways to do it on other vendors equipment (which is outside the scope of this article). So here is how to configure the
Windows Server DHCP Option 66 Reservation
Turn the phone on its back and record the MAC address of the device.
Start the DHCP administrative tool on the server.
Expand the tree into the IPv4 then into the Scope needing the reservation.
Right Click on Reservations and choose “New Reservation…”
Give the new reservation a name, specify IP address and MAC address previously recorded.
Right click on the new reservation and choose Configure Options.
In the Reservation options scroll down to 066 Boot Server Host Name and enter the URL or IP of the vendors configuration server.
Make sure the vendor has reset the authorization token and factory reset the phone to pull the new reservation and configuration files.
Cisco 800 Series DHCP Option 66 Reservation Setup
Something to remember is that each reservation is treated as its own DHCP pool by the router. (I recommend exporting the configuration file to a local workstation and manually editting if there are more than a couple edits to make.)
Login to router and enter configuration terminal mode:
Clear the current DHCP bindings to make sure the phone will grab the correct address:
Router#clear ip dhcp binding *
Make sure the vendor has reset the authorization token and factory reset the phone to pull the new reservation and configuration files.
That is all there is to it. Enjoy a multi-vendor VoIP environment. If you need help configuring your Windows Server or Cisco IOS based router please contact us for support.
Recently wrestled with a Juniper SRX 220 router that a client needed help with securing RingCentral on. This entailed creating port forwarding rules for specific secure port ranges for TLS transport and linking those with rules for specific IP ranges belonging to RingCentral servers. Here are the specific lines of code that were used to make this connection possible (I am also throwing in the CoS settings used to shape traffic for good measure):
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT match source-address RingCentral_IP1
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT match destination-address any
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT match application RingCentral
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP1_NAT then permit
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT match source-address RingCentral_IP2
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT match destination-address any
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT match application RingCentral
security policies from-zone Internet to-zone LAN policy RingCentral_IP2_NAT then permit
security zones security-zone Internet address-book address RingCentral_IP1 199.255.120.0/22
security zones security-zone Internet address-book address RingCentral_IP2 199.68.212.0/22
applications application RingCentral term Mobile_App_Media destination-port 4000-5000 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term Phone_Registration_UDP destination-port 5060-6000 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term Phone_Registration_TCP destination-port 5060-6000 protocol tcp
applications application RingCentral term RTP_SRTP_Softphone1 destination-port 8000-8200 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term RC_Meeting_Signaling_UDP destination-port 8801-8802 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term RC_Meeting_Signaling_TCP destination-port 8801-8802 protocol tcp
applications application RingCentral term RTP_SRTP_Deskphone destination-port 16384-16482 protocol udp
applications application RingCentral term RTP_SRTP_Softphone2 destination-port 20000-60000 protocol udp
This should be everything unless you have custom firewall filters to lock down management access or something else like that. Please feel free to contact us if you need any help configuring either your RingCentral account or Juniper routers or switches.
And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others. As the Scriptures say,
“They share freely and give generously to the poor. Their good deeds will be remembered forever.”
For God is the one who provides seed for the farmer and then bread to eat. In the same way, he will provide and increase your resources and then produce a great harvest of generosity in you. - 2 Corinthians 9:8-10
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
