The major differences are:

1) Professional edition supports interactive touch-tone response and voice message

2) Professional edition is capable of playing different messages for human pick up vs. answering machine

3) Professional edition can customize and personalize your message using a built-in Message Designer

4) Professional edition supports call transfer to any phone (including your cell phone).

The standard edition of Voicent BroadcastByPhone is only capable of broadcasting one pre-recorded voice message to the entire call list. You can not play different voice messages in the broadcast. No response can be recorded from the recipients.

The Professional version of BroadcastByPhone has a “call 'till confirm” feature that can be used in a call escalation process. It also has the ability to automatically schedule calls for the next day if the current call list is too long and cannot be finished before the scheduled off-hours cutoff time.

With Professional Edition, the system can:

1. Enable your customer to press a key, such as 0, to have the call transferred to a live agent or to another phone. For example, you can have the call transferred to your cell phone, so you don't have to wait by the phone for your customers to call in.

2. Collect confirmations or responses from recipients. The person who receives the call can, for example, press 1 to confirm, press 2 to cancel, or press 3 to leave a voice message. You can design the confirmation prompt anyway you like.

3. Play different messages for answering machine or human pickup.

4. Use multiple phone lines simultaneously. This can dramatically increase your outbound call volume.

5. Use text-to-speech and speech command. You can include any text information in the spreadsheet for your message. The audio for the text will be automatically generated by a text-to-speech engine.

For example, your message can start with "Hi John...", where 'John' is the name column of your call list. You can also include speech command/response in your message. For example, the person who receives the call can replay the phone messages by saying a voice command such as 'Play It Again.' If you have important information such as your name or phone numbers, this feature will enable people to hear it again if they want to write it down.

6. Broadcast personalized messages including each person’s name, a specific message just for that person, either using text-to-speech or pre-recorded audio file. It can play different messages depending on whether or not a live person answers or an answering machine picks up.

For example, for a live person the recorded message might be: "Hello [Mr. Gate], this is John Green. Thank you very much for your campaign contribution of [one hundred dollars]. Please don't forget to cast your vote for me on November second. To learn more about my campaign, you can visit my website at www.mywebsite.com, or call 555-3456. If you want to hear this message again, please say Play It Again.  The words in italic with a bracket […] can be replaced with any words you choose. If an answering machine picks up the call, the same message could be played with the last sentence omitted.

Voicent BroadcastByPhone also has an Enterprise Edition. It contains all features provided by the Professional Edition, plus it supports cloud-based environments.

Make sure your recording does not have silence at the beginning. If so, you can use the Microsoft Sound Recorder or other tools to cut off the beginning silence.

If you use VOIP for phone calls, please make sure you have a good and reliable broadband internet connection. Each line requires 64Kbps for both download and upload speed. In addition, try not to use a wireless connection. For more info, please see call progress detection.

You should select the checkbox “automatically schedule calls for next day if not finished” in the Start/Schedule broadcast dialog. The call will start from where it left off previosuly. This feature is only available in the professional version.

If you do not set this feature, recurring calls always start at the beginning of the call list.

This feature is used in the call escalation process. For example, support engineers John, Joe, and Jason are the people to notify when the alarm goes off. If John is available, there is no need to notify Joe and Jason. To set up the “Call Till Confirm” broadcast, select the checkbox “Stop broadcast after getting confirmation code” and set the confirmation code in the next edit box. If John is not available when called, the program will call Joe; and if Joe enters the confirmation code, the program will not call Jason and broadcast will stop automatically.

It is possible to use this feature from the command line interface. If you have an alert system and a call escalation software, you can easily integrate it with Voicent BroadcastByPhone.

You can add as many columns as you need. Select a cell or column where you want a column to be inserted. Select Edit > Insert Column... from the program main menu.

You can also use the Message Designer to create a message that requires additional columns. The column will be added automatically after you select the message for for call list.

The section titled "Use call specific audio file or text-to-speech item" describes the steps to create a new message template that needs additional columns.

Once you have designed a new message template, select Broadcast -> Select Message from the main menu, choose the desired message template and the new columns will be added automatically.

This depends on how many phone lines you have and how long your message is. For a typical 30-second message, on average, you would be making 1 call per minute, and 60 calls per hour on a single line.

The processes of making calls are similar to a human making phone calls. It first dials the number and waits for the other end to pick up the phone. If it is answered by an answering machine, the system listens for the whole message and waits for the beep. It then plays your message.

Yes, you need Enterprise Edition to do so. See Enterprise Edition  for more information on how to make large call volume using many computers that are located at different locations.