Phoneshell: the telephone as computer terminal

Abstract

This paper describes Phoneshell, a telephone based application providing remote voice access to personal desktop databases such as voice mail, email, calendar, and rolodex. Several forms of information can also be faxed on demand. Phoneshell offers its users numerous opportunities to record voice entries into its underlying databases; this new utility for stored voice as a data type, necessitates multimedia support for the traditional graphical user interfaces to these same databases. The experiences of a small Phoneshell user community are discussed, with emphasis on key features which are most important to its success. The underlying software architecture used by Phoneshell includes a toolkit for building interactive telephone-based services.