
 ==========================================
 THE TEXTFILES.COM PHONE INFORMATION CENTER
 ==========================================

 In March of 2001, When I discovered a cool voice-recognition 
 system called 1-800-555-TELL, I immediately set about learning 
 what I could about it, and its strange programming system. 

 It worked in a XML-complaint language called VXML, which made
 programming a call-in line with voice recognition crazily easy.
 You wrote stuff in the source, and they gave you an actual phone
 extension to put your fun up! And it was free! How could I resist
 this little game?

 So I set about creating a dial-in version of textfiles.com. But 
 what would that be? I wasn't going to have it read out textfiles,
 that'd be too weird. So I decided that it would be a funny Phreaky
 kind of thing to use this new technology to let people dial in 
 and get phone box plans! 

 The TELLME system had this really cool feature; you called a 800
 number, and could record a message, then have that recorded 
 message e-mailed to your development address. That's right, a 
 free recording and digitization setup!

 I tried my own voice, but I didn't have the right tone. To the 
 rescue came my friend James "Snuh" Smith, who had a glorious 
 voice and a real authoritative tone. I gave him a script, and
 he read off them. 

 We did three sessions, which is why there's an a, b and c set
 of samples. We tried some different phrases, and we tried some
 alternate approaches to listing out numbers and frequencies.

 What this archive holds are all the related .wav files and VXML 
 source of the TEXTFILES.COM Phone Information Center. If you're 
 a masochist, you can read through the VXML and figure out what 
 played where.

 This setup lasted for two glorious years before finally being
 shut off in April of 2003. A big thank-you to TELLME for running
 the project as long as they did; hundreds, maybe thousands of
 people played with the TEXTFILES.COM Phone Information Center
 over the years. 

 Enjoy the samples.

 - Jason Scott
   TEXTFILES.COM

