Intervoice teams with EEN for multi-modal notification

Intervoice and the Emergency Email Network have partnered with federal and municipal agencies to deliver a voice-enabled emergency event notification system for both the government and telecom sectors.

The Omvia Notification service, part of Intervoice’s Voice Express packaged Application suite, can deliver alert messages to most wireline, wireless or Internet-enabled communications devices, via voice, e-mail or short message service (SMS.)

The service was jointly architected by Intervoice and the EEN. It is a multi-modal system that can deliver alerts in either format or all of them simultaneously. Intervoice provides the text to speech conversion for the voice messages.

"The multimodal nature of this solution really makes it compelling," said Mike Segura, product marketing director at Intervoice. "It is the first solution of this type that provides for organizations a standard of reasonable care so they can notify constituents or employees of issues that may affect their physical being or their network."

EEN is based in Jacksonville, Fla. It has both a non-profit organization as well as the for-profit group that Intervoice partners with.

Intervoice expects to make public in the coming weeks implementations where carriers play a significant role. "We will rely on both the PSTN and wireless operators because we will be working with geo-coded spatial data to triangulate specific locations in the event of, say, a bioterrorism nerve gas plume or fire and we’ll target specific emergency response teams to be routed to specific areas," Segura said.

The company also expects carriers to use the service to serve their large enterprise customers. The biggest initial uptake will be in the government sector.

Users of the service will use a Web portal to administer the type of alerts they wish to send and the constituency to whom it sends them. They can use it for terrorism warnings, weather alerts, news and financial alerts, workplace violence notifications, etc.

Intervoice and the EEN have coordinated with federal agencies, phone companies, wireless and other network providers to get priority access to the network for specific periods of time in the event of an emergency. "That’s the triumvirate we have with this. It is critical to have partnerships with the federal agencies," Segura said.

The voice notification, which Intervoice provides, is currently delivered in English. The company expects to add multi-lingual capabilities in the future.