Octel Communications Corp, Milpitas, California has enhanced its voicemail offering with the announcement that users can now send and receive facsimile messages through their voicemail box, making the multimedia mailbox a repository for speech and facsimile messages and database information. The addition of FaxAgent to an Octel voice information processing system enables users to access the mailbox via any touchtone phone to be told how many messages – whether speech or facsimile – are waiting. Users can listen to the spoken messages and direct facsimiles to any machine using the phone keypad. Faxes can be saved in order to be printed later or can be sent to other system subscribers again using the keypad on a touch tone phone. The sender of the message can record a spoken message to leave with the faxed document; the recipient will hear the annotation before deciding whether to print the message. Faxes can be labelled as private, preventing them being forwarded to anyone else. Octel has also announced two other products: FaxBroadcast, enabling a document to be sent to many locations using a single transaction and FaxStation, an overflow mailbox designed to eliminate problems caused by busy signals or fax machines out of paper. FaxStation is a store and forward device: faxes are delivered as soon as the station becomes available.
