How to Convert Touch Tones to Specific Words

Some telephony applications will require the ability to accept freeform text input from the user with a high degree of accuracy. Active Call Center's speech recognition features are not useful for accepting freeform input, nor is speech recognition a very accurate means of accepting input.

To address this issue, we have developed a COM object that is capable of translating touch tone input to words by way of a translation table. The basic idea is that the caller enters pairs of touch tone sequences in which pairs of touch tones represent characters and letters. This type of technology is often used when doing touch-tone stock trading.

The COM object used to translate touch tones is called "ACCTools.TouchToneKeyboard". The object has one method (function):

• Translate: this function is used to translate a series of touch tones into words using a specified translation table. The function accepts two parameters: the name of the translation table and the sequence of tones to translate.

The translation table should be a text file formatted as shown in the abbreviated sample below:

21 A
22 B
23 C
31 D
32 E
35 }
36 SPACE

etc.

Notice that each line represents one entry in the table. On each line, the first two characters represent the sequence of touch tones, they are followed by a single space, and finally the character being represented. If the character being represented is a space, use the word SPACE as shown in the example above. For an example of a complete translation table, refer to the file "TouchToneDictionary.txt" located in the Active Call Center program folder.

Example

The sample code below illustrates the use of the touch tone converter. Replace the fixed value of the string "23218136216231366163827432#" with the Response variable to use this sample code in a Call Tree. Note that not all line breaks will appear in the correct places depending on the media on which the file is viewed.

' Define a variable for the keyboard object and
' one variable for the phrase.
Dim Keyboard, Phrase
' Create the Touch Tone Keyboard object.
Set Keyboard = _
CreateObject("ACCTools.TouchToneKeyboard")
' Use the object to get the phrase.
Phrase = _
Keyboard.Translate("C:\Program Files\Active Call Center\TouchToneDictionary.txt", _
"23218136216231366163827432#")
' Display the phrase
MsgBox Phrase

Using the default dictionary file that's shipped with Active Call Center, the macro above will translate the touch tones to read "CAT AND MOUSE".