Just in the research stage to see if this might be possible.

We want to put together a system that will e-mail reminders to people about appointments, send a reminder postcard, or make an automated appointment reminder phone call.

I can handle the e-mail and postcards with no problems.

Are there any products out there that will work with access / VBA to make automated phone calls? All we need it to do is say something like "You have an appointment with XYZ on January the 1st at 3:300 pm. Press 1 if you will be able to make this appointment. Press 2 if you need to cancel or reschedule.”

If anyone has any experience with this, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you,
Rob

I wrote one many many years ago that used the Windows dialler, but the code was lost during a major disc crash. You could write one that integrated Windows speech I suppose, but I don't have any experience with that.

Another option existed on a system I worked on around the same time, which made use of external autodialler hardware. I didn't work on the dialler integration itself, and unfortunately I don't recall much about it now, but rest assured, it can be done.

see post #78 here

http://www.dbforums.com/microsoft-access/1...ode-bank-6.html

I recently cobbled together a reminder system in Access 2007 for my wife's office that sends emails and makes reminder calls. The email part was pretty easy with a bit of advice from the forum on using Outlook to handle the outbound emails. The phone reminders proved to be a bit more interesting but with the aid of Twilio.com as the phone gateway it worked pretty nice. Actually Twilio requires you to host their calling programs on a server and write the phone call logic in PHP or with one of several other languages they support. My wife's ofifce sends out about 50-75 reminders a day. Once the call request are uploaded, Twilio makes all of the calls in about one minute or less.

I wasn't quite brave enough to write the PHP code and got a fellow on the Twilio support forum to lend a hand. Basically, with Twilio you issue a URL per phone call that includes the basic information like name, phone numbers, date of appointment, etc. Then the sound files you have loaded on the server (WAV files) along with Twilio's text to speech (TTS) assembles the voice components into a smooth phone call. Sound files are quite easy to make using a robotic voice and an editor like Audacity.

Twilio reminder calls cost us 3 cents each at their basic cost of 3 cents a minute since they all run less than one minute. The person receiving the call pushes tone buttons to reply and an XML file comes back with the results. You might also look into using Asterisk. In either case, I suggest rounding up a partner with experince hosting their product on a server (Twilio or Asterisk) if you don't have this background.

There are several companies that make developer kits in VB.net that simplify the development if you want to use a modem in your local PC. There are even a couple of companies that sell packaged PC hardware and software and hundreds that sell turn key services.

Reminder message systems are almost always a work in progress as you learn lessons and tweak the system. It's nice to keep your hands on it if you have the time. There are lots of options. Really, almost too many.

Good Luck

Mike

Thanks everyone.

I now have a great starting point. You have saved me many hours of research.

Rob