1A Voice Storage System: Prologue

1.1 Motivation In modern times, distant voice communication in the United States has been predominantly by telephone. There are some applications for which voice is recorded, transmitted (perhaps by mail), and replayed, but this form of "taped letter" is the exception rather than the rule. A constraining factor when communicating by telephone is that both the calling and called parties must simultaneously be available. The probability of a successful call completion is approximately 0.75. Unfortunately, the successful completion is often to the desired line but not to the desired terminating party and, thus, additional calls are required to complete the communication. In many cases, the required communication need be only one way. When this is true, it would be convenient to leave a voice message on the first calling attempt. Such a capability is being introduced with the 1A Voice Storage System (vss) and Custom Calling Services (ccs) II. 1.2 Elements of voice communication Clearly, when people are together in the same place at the same time, they can simply talk. If they are available at the same time, but are in different places, they need some sort of transmission path between them. This path can be as exotic as a fiber optic cable carrying millions of conversations simultaneously in a digital bit stream or it can be as simple as a string between two tin cans. If people are in the same place at different times, some storage media is required. For text, the medium could be paper on a bulletin board, a paper note, or a message scrawled on the washroom wall.