Exploring PC-telephone convergence with the enhanced telephony prototype

Abstract

Industry trends suggest that the PC and telephone user experiences will converge over the next several years. This convergence raises important questions for the HCI community: how should the PC-phone user experience be designed, and how does PC-phone technology affect work practices? This paper focuses on the first question and provides some initial data on the second question. We describe a PC-phone prototype we built called Enhanced Telephony, and we report data from an eight month field deployment of Enhanced Telephony within our company where over 7,000 people installed the prototype. Results indicate that PC-phone software is a promising technology for the workplace and that the most valuable features may be those that help people manage their incoming calls.

Enhancing Enterprise User Productivity with Embedded Context-Aware Voice Applications

“…In other words, traditional telephony provides no decision support for call placement to the caller either. Even state of the art presence-enhanced telephony tools [4,7] fare only marginally better than caller ID. For example, in the two scenarios in Section 1, Alice was present in both scenarios but available only for the incoming call in the second scenario.…”

“…In other words, voice communication processes have not kept pace with the technological improvements in telephony endpoints and devices, networks, and switches. For example, while presence-enhanced softphone features are state-of-the-art in enterprise voice communications, it has not eliminated the phenomena of phone tag, unwanted interruptions of busy users through incoming calls, or busy users rejecting incoming calls that later turn out to be important [4]. Such incidents hamper the efficiency, effectiveness, and convenience of enterprise voice communication processes as we will show in two scenarios below.…”

The Connector Service-Predicting Availability in Mobile Contexts

“…The "Live Contacts" system [12] also provides preferences for communication channels. "Enhanced Telephony" [13] is a desktop-based design of an enhanced PC-phone. In all of these systems, users must either manually update their availability state or context information is inferred automatically from sources such as login time, personal calendars, messenger status, idle time of computer input devices, and engagement in communication activities.…”

MyConnector

“…The "Live Contacts" system [11] also provides preferences for communication channels. "Enhanced Telephony" [10] is a desktop-based design of an enhanced PC-phone. The "Lilsys" system has used ambient sensors in order to enhance an IM client [2].…”