Record the silence before the message

[jbrohan]

Hello
I'd like to record the delay before the sounds to be recorded start. It's not speech that I'm trying to record, and the recording only starts a little after the sound actually starts, and I miss both the hesitation and the start of the sound.
Thanks
John

[support]

Hi,

It is not exactly clear what you are asking for. Could you provide an IVR example or further explain the IVR issue?

Regards,
Plum Support

[jbrohan]

Background
I'm recording the sound of urine hitting the water in a toilet bowl. We have technology which can convert this into a uroflow trace. This is a useful diagnostic to tell if a person has an obstruction in his urine outflow, commonly caused by enlargement of the prostate in middle aged men.

The way we test is to record the sound of the urine hitting the water, using a cell phone. It works fine with the Plum System except for one aspect. The recording does not start as soon as the prompt ends, it starts when there are some sounds. In fact it starts a second or two after the sound starts.

One of the diagnostic parameters we need is whether there is delay from wishing to pee and actually starting. I'm not recording this in the Plum setup, since the silent period after the prompt is dropped from the recording.

http://www.sonouroflow.com/z40d (you can try this URL) is an example where I paused for 5 seconds after the prompt before pouring a small jug of water into the toilet as a test. The 5 second quiet period is missing and the recording and the trace miss a second or two of the sound at the start.

What would I like you to do?
Tell me the parameters or some other trick to start the recording at the end of the prompt!

Thank you
John Brohan

[support]

Hi,

You could try making the prompt non-bargeable and set your sensitivity value to 1.0 to record the quiet period after the prompt. This isn't a guaranteed solution, but it should help you accomplish your IVR goal.

Regards,
Plum Support

[jbrohan]

Thanks for your reply
Can you tell me about the logic in your system that captures voices correctly but not the sounds I'm interested in.

Is there a way to include a prompt onto the <record>? It seems to me that If I can get it started recording the prompt and continue with what I want recorded, it might help solve my problem.

Thanks
John

[support]

Hi,

The logic behind the IVR tag, <record>, is:

1) If you have a prompt within your record tag, this prompt will be played first.
2) If you set a beep attribute for your record tag, this beep will be played.
3) After the beep, the IVR platform listens for a voice/sound (depends on your sensitivity setting: if you set it to a value close to 0, you would have to speak clearly and loudly for the recording to start; if you set it to a value close to 1, any background noise/voice would cause the recording to start)
4) The recording completes once the IVR platform senses no more sound (again depends on the sensitivity value) or if the user presses the "#" key.

Regards,
Plum Support

[jbrohan]

Sorry to keep on about this problem, but it's really important to us. I checked with the VoiceXML specification and it's a "platform choice" whether to record the silence before a recording or to wait for the speaker to say something.

Is there any way to get output sounds onto a recording? I would imagine that in a complex question and answer system people might want to record both the question and the answer. I'm thinking to stimulate the recording to start by outputting a message which will get recorded. Do you have a way to do this?

Thanks John

[support]

Hi,

Yes, you can use the IVR property, "recordcall" to achieve this goal. Here is some sample IVR code to demonstrate its use:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<vxml version="2.0">

  <form>
    <property name="recordcall" value="true"/>
    <property name="sensitivity" value="0.8"/>
      <record finalsilence="10000ms">
        <prompt timeout="60s">
          Please urinate into the toilet.
        </prompt>
        <noinput>
        </noinput>
     </record>
     <block>
       <submit next="savecallrecording.php" namelist="callrecording" method="post"/>
     </block>
  </form>
</vxml>

This should help you capture the sounds from your recording. The prompt timeout of 60s allows the user 60 seconds after the prompt to begin the recording and the finalsilence of 10000ms allows you to capture 10 seconds after the user has finished.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Plum Support

[jbrohan]

Thanks very much!!
Now you are getting into the spirit of the thing! Works fine!

How do I collect the termchar? callrecording$.termchar does not seem to work
John

[support]

Hi,

You can only use the termchar shadow variable for the <record> tag. So, if you wanted to capture termchar in your IVR script, you could do the following:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<vxml version="2.0">

  <form>
    <property name="recordcall" value="true"/>
    <property name="sensitivity" value="0.8"/>
      <record name="urinarydata" finalsilence="10000ms">
	<prompt timeout="60s">
          Please urinate into the toilet.
        </prompt>
	<noinput>
	</noinput>
	<filled>
	  You terminated your recording by pressing <value expr="urinarydata$.termchar"/>.
	  <assign name="termchar" expr="urinarydata$.termchar"/>
	</filled>
      </record>
      <block>
        <submit next="savecallrecording.php" namelist="callrecording termchar" method="post"/>
      </block>
  </form>
</vxml>

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Plum Support

[jbrohan]

Thanks very much. Works perfectly. The examples you write are most helpful.

John