INVESTIGATING THE MESSAGE SYSTEMS

In this work, we intend to make a voice messaging system, which has the merits of E-mail that uses the written words. It must preserve the both advantages of E-mail and spontaneous speech.

The followings are the merits of E-mail system that we regard as important.

• E-mail is an asynchronous communication system. It means the sender and the receiver of a message do not use it at the same time. The users of E-mail can make a message or reply at any time.

  Messages are accumulated in the storages, so they can be displayed at any time. It is also easy to make the copy or excerpt of the message.

• The message is displayed as the written words. Because we can browse the written words easily, the messages are easy to deal with.

The communication with written words, however, has the following weak points compared to the voice conversation such as telephone.

• The written words cannot convey para-linguistic features, such as emotional information.

• The mood of the person who read the message is not known until he writes the reply. At the synchronous communication such as speech dialog, however, the speaker can see the mood of the other while he is speaking.

There are some applications which are designed for sending voice mails. They have the ability to compress the speech files to transfer with the limited bandwidth. Most of them, however, are designed based on the text-based mailer, so the written words are more handy than the voice data. Such systems do not appeal the merit of using voice message.