Intelligent dial tone allows you to talk over the dial tone and have the telephone system know what you want. A simple example is ComputerTalk’s SayMyName application.  Simply state the name of the person or department you want, whether internal or external, and ice³ will dial their contact number (or numbers) to find that person.

There are many other applications of intelligent dial tone, for example: if you pick up the phone and say “home”, ice³ knows who you are and will dial your home number.  If you say “Fred”, ice³ will automatically disambiguate this.  For example, “Do you want Fred Bloggs or Fred Flintstone?” 

ice³ is fully integrated with Office and Outlook. So if you have a conference booked in your calendar, pick up the phone, say “Outlook Conference” and ice³ will look up the other parties and call them automatically.

ice³ can also choose which numbers to dial based on time of day, day of week, recent calls, regular scheduled calls, database lookups, calendar entries, etc.  Prior to placing the call, a workflow can analyse the requirements and carry out intelligent processing on those requirements.  For example, using presence awareness technology, if a contact has their status set to Away or Busy, the caller can be informed of this prior to the call being placed. 

For a Company, a large proportion of the calls to switchboard are internal calls from staff who do not know the location or number of an employee.  These calls, and hence the overhead on the switchboard, can be eliminated.  The upkeep of the database of numbers is very simple via a web interface or data import facility.

ice³ can integrate with any voice network provider.  This opens up opportunities for customers ordering services and products by simply stating their requirements over the dial tone.  For example, if a customer says “Pizza” they will be connected to the local Pizza Company.  The Pizza company can then pay the network provider on a “pay-per-transfer” basis to get that business.  The possibilities for this type of automation and revenue generation are endless.

Intelligent Dial Tone is the future of voice based communication.