Voice Dialers And VOIP

Question

Are your Voice Dialer products compatible with Voice over IP (Internet) phones?

Are your Voice Dialer products compatible with my new "digital phone service" that I can use my regular telephone with?

Answer

Both the DS7000 and the PA5800 dialers are compatible with VoIP phones as far as we have seen. We have not done any in-house testing, but many customers have reported success. You need a VoIP router with a regular RJ11 phone jack on it that puts out a normal dial tone. However, you can't use VoIP to call ORCA from a DC8700 or PA9200 (the monitored consoles.) We use caller ID to recognize where the call came from, and then look up your records based on their phone number. If we don't know where the call came from, we ignore it. VoIP doesn't tell you where the call came from unless your service provider assigns them a specific phone number (which most of them don't).

If you are evaluating different VoIP solutions and want to ensure they will work with our dialers, just ask if you can hook up a regular fax machine. If you cannot use a fax machine with a service, then our dialers probably won't work either.

If you are having problems getting a voice dialer working, here are a couple of things to try:

• Use a DSL Filter before the DS7000. Do this whether or not you have DSL.
• If you are using Vonage, please email them and ask them to change your "packetization" to 10 milliseconds from the default value of 20 milliseconds.

It's important to note however, that if you have a power outage (or an intruder turns your power off outside your home) your cable or DSL modem, router and phone device will be without power, and your VoIP phone line will be down. Your voice dialer will be ineffective in this situation. A power backup system as used for personal computers, could be one solution to keep your modems, routers and VoIP phone line working continuously.