Frequently Asked Questions

Some questions and answers for the less technically minded...

The Freedom Fone platform provides you with a collection of useful tools with which to engage, inform and encourage feedback from an audience of telephone users. Whether they use traditional landlines, basic mobile phones, Skype or other ‘soft’ phones they have what it takes to communicate with your Freedom Fone service.

Have a look at this power point presentation (167KB) for a little background information. Read the FAQs prepared by the development team.

The Freedom Fone software and installation instructions can be found here. Note that the software download available from this website is version 1.0. Version 1.5 is currently being tested and will be available in mid February 2010.

1. What must my organisation invest in to use Freedom Fone?

   • A desire to reach across the digital divide and offer information on demand to telephone users.
   • A spare computer with these recommended specs: RAM: 1GB, Processor: 1.6GHz.
   • One or more mobile sim cards.
   • One or more of the GSM devices described below.

2. What equipment will we need to connect the Freedom Fone computer to our mobile sim cards?

   • You could run a Freedom Fone deployment with one or more, or a combination of, the following GSM devices:

     • VoiceBlue Lite – Takes 4 sim cards and can handle 4 concurrent calls. Cost approx EUR 900.
     • MobiGater – Takes 1 sim card. Cost approx EUR 70.

3. Do I need a techie to help me install Freedom Fone?

Version 1 does require technical Linux experience. Don't lose heart though because we are addressing this issue as quickly as we can. We will release another version of Freedom Fone early in 2010 which will include a few more important features and will come with an installer. With the installer, you should be able to handle the setup on your own.

4. What are the minimum specifications for the computer used to run Freedom Fone?

RAM: 1GB, Processor: 1.6GHz.

5. What can I do with Freedom Fone v1?

For a start, you can experiment with voice menus, sms polls, automated callbacks and caller feedback via the leave-a-message feature.

voice menus = Information on demand

Our simple interface makes it easy for you to create and modify voice menus that callers will hear when they dial your phone numbers. The tools make it possible for you to change these audio menus as often as you see fit. Members of the public can call your numbers anytime they need to.

Imagine that you are a running an emergency health service around a cholera epidemic, your menus could sound like this.

You could improve the voice menus as and when new or better information becomes available.

In future versions you will be able to:

- nest menus, allowing you to consider multi-lingual services amongst other things.
- record audio content directly using a microphone or telephone connected to the Freedom Fone server

sms polls & leave-a-message = A two-way communication channel

There are two useful features that facilitate two-way communication: the Create a Poll and Leave a Message components.

Version 1 enables you to run SMS polls and track the responses via your Freedom Fone console. The next version will add functionality that allows you to optionally integrate a poll into your voice menu options making it possible for callers to vote in a poll after hearing their choices. As the software develops you will be able to share the results of your polls in a variety of ways with the people who participated in them eg RSS feeds, SMS notifications, website updates.

The Leave-a-Message facility records voice messages left by your callers. A caller can review, re-record, save or delete their voice message at the time they leave their message. You are able to title, rate, categorise and tag these audio files for later use.

Imagine that you’re mobilizing around an election. As events unfold you get ‘telephone reporters’ to call-in to your Freedom Fone service and leave voice reports of what they’re seeing. After verifying events, you edit their reports and create new audio material for your call-in election monitoring service.

callbacks = no cost to caller

If you have the necessary budget to cover the cost of some or all of the phone time, people who cannot afford to call-in to listen to your information have a couple of other options:

- Send an SMS with a keyword like "callback" to a mobile number connected to your Freedom Fone server.

- Call a 'tickle' number connected to your Freedom Fone server (this is a designated number that is set to identify the caller and disconnect the line without ever answering the call).

Freedom Fone will attempt to make callbacks to the numbers received.

Later versions of Freedom Fone will provide for White and blacklists which you can use to specify who may or may not benefit from this 'free' access.

6. Will we be able to monitor what callers access from our audio menus?

Useful reporting on what callers are listening to will become available from the next version. In that version, all information relating to callers and call records will be stored securely.

7. What skills do we need?

Most important is that you understand the information needs of your audience/community. At its core, Freedom Fone is about building call-in voice menus. You are likely to progress quickly if you already have audio editing skills. Remember, your audience are likely to be paying for a phone call to listen to your content so it will need to be compelling and to the point!

8. What other useful features are in the pipeline for Freedom Fone?

There's a lot to come, especially those features that help you run an efficient call-in and callback information on demand service. We need to:

- bring more functionality to the user interface to help you add more phone lines and connect them to different functions and voice menus.
- incorporate callback monitoring and load balancing across available lines
- add security to callbacks (white/blacklists)
- create caller accounts
- make it possible to swap Freedom Fone data with your favourite CMS
- and lots more!

We are experimenting with text to speech technology that will allow Freedom Fone deployers to automate relevant parts of their service eg market prices or weather reports.

In order to deliver the easy to use product we have promised, we intend to limit the number of features to begin with and concentrate on the user interface and installers.

9. If the software displays errors or behaves unpredictably, how should I communicate this information?

Please take the time to send us this information as a Bug Report. Give us as much information as you can. Don't forget to check out the development team's answers to technical FAQs.

10. How do I request a new feature for Freedom Fone?

If you would like to request a new feature to be included in a future version of Freedom Fone, please complete a New Ticket in our Trac's Ticketing System, remembering to select Feature Request (_feature_request) from the Component dropdown menu when submitting your request.