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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce VoxGrid, a mobile voice verification system intended for improving the security of the username-password authentication scheme. Design/methodology/approach – The system incorporates text-dependant speaker verification via mobile devices that provides for a three-factor authentication scheme for granting authorised access to certain websites or applications. The same speech recognition engine used by Google Voice Search is utilised to provide voice-to-text feature. All verification tasks are performed on a centralised server to minimise computing requirements on mobile platforms where feature extractions is executed using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients. The resulting features are transmitted to the server instead of raw voice data to reduce network load. Actual voice verification takes place in the central server using Vector Quantisation. Findings – The initial results have indicated that VoxGrid is capable of providing an additional level of security on user authentications at a low cost and without using extra security tokens other than one's voice with a good enough performance given the limited resources available during testing. Originality/value – Past speaker verification experiments have been conducted but we see that this is the first time it is done on mobile devices with a client-server architecture using K-Means Clustering and Vector Quantisation. Future improvements on performance and testing could result in a more secure mobile computing environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model Management addresses the problem of managing an evolving collection of models by capturing the relationships between models and providing well-defined operators to manipulate them. In this paper, we describe two such operators for manipulating feature specifications described using hierarchical state machine models: Match, for finding correspondences between models, and Merge, for combining models with respect to known or hypothesized correspondences between them. Our Match operator is heuristic, making use of both static and behavioral properties of the models to improve the accuracy of matching. Our Merge operator preserves the hierarchical structure of the input models, and handles differences in behavior through parameterization. This enables us to automatically construct merges that preserve the semantics of hierarchical state machines. We report on tool support for our Match and Merge operators, and illustrate and evaluate our work by applying these operators to a set of telecommunication features built by AT&T. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The convergence of computing and telecommunication technologies has made it possible for users to access different types of messages ubiquitously. This article describes a Java-based unified messaging system that provides a unified mailbox for e-mail, fax, and voice messages. The system serves to present these common modes of communication with a uniform interface. Users can access the system from anywhere via the web and WAP-enabled mobile phones or, alternatively, through PSTN phones. Java technology is used in the implementation, which is based on a distributed client-server model and is platform independent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociolinguistic research suggests that women are more likely than men to use politeness strategies in their speech. Researchers have reported that women pay more compliments than men, that women in talk with same-sex peers use a large number of positive-politeness strategies while men in analogous situations do not, and that women are more likely to apologize, soften criticism or express thanks than men. However, most studies of gender variations in politeness have not examined the relationship between situation and language use. In this data drawn from voice mail messages in a legal setting, male speakers’ use of politeness markers was roughly equal to that of women''s. Moreover, positive politeness strategies were used almost exclusively by male speakers, and only by attorneys, and the two speakers who used the greatest number of politeness markers in individual messages were both men. Factors which may play a role in explaining these findings include the one-sided nature of voice mail communications and the fact that the data were generated in a legal setting and that seven of the eleven speakers were attorneys. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

How the Cincinnati Enquirer's hard-hitting investigation of Chiquita Brands International unraveled. It was a slow Saturday night in June for the associated press' Joe Kay. He usually covers sports, but [...]

This paper summarizes results of a user evaluation survey of computer-based telephone messaging ('voice mail') technologies. A mail survey of the population of voice mail users in state government agencies [...]

When the people at Voice Powered Technology International (VPTI--Canoga Park, CA) set out to create a portable business organizer, they wanted to emulate a voice mail system--and they wanted it […]

This study examines the impact of the introduction of voice mail on (1) the effectiveness of the interorganizational relationship between a manufacturing firm and its network of dealerships and (2) the sales performance of these dealerships. As voice mail was introduced into two of five sales regions, this trial intervention provided an opportunity to assess these organizational impacts using a quasi-experimental research design. The results indicate that voice mail enhanced interorganizational effectiveness as measured by dealership sales performance in two primary ways: directly, due to the store and forward nature of voice mail; and indirectly, due to improved interorganizational relationships between the manufacturer's field representatives and the dealerships' sales managers enabled by the more effective use of written communication media. The study also demonstrates the importance, when examining the organizational impacts of information technology, of devising data-gathering procedures which tightly link the functionality of the technology being examined to specific organizational processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals who have ready access to three new communication media— email, vmail, and fax—may elect to use only one medium, or two or more in combination. Users make choices based on evaluations of the utility of each medium for their communication tasks (a function of the types of work they perform). Individuals may assess technological characteristics to evaluate the technological utility of each medium. However, since communication media require multiple users, individuals also may be expected to assess characteristics of the user community to evaluate the social utility of each medium. Social utility may be influenced by people's perceptions of the existence of a critical mass of media users, and by the social influence of their peers and superiors. This study finds that perceptions of the technological and social utility of email, vmail, and fax are relatively independent of the types of work people perform. Social utility explains media usage somewhat better than technological utility, except in the case of email. Thus, the concept of social utility should be given more attention in future investigations of media choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How are new media, such as electronic mail, voice mail, and fax, used when people have access to several of them simultaneously? This paper reports findings from a field study of media use in four sizable subunits within two large organizations where most employees had access to email, vmail, and fax. Respondents tended to use multiple electronic media rather than relying on one. However, they also showed a tendency to prefer one medium for asynchronous communication and to use the others for occasional, specialized purposes. Further, there were considerable differences across subunits in typical media use patterns. Although respondents expressed strong desires for multimedia integration, this study suggests that technological integration may not necessarily result in seamless, collaborative work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]