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tclaremont
tclaremont
Inspiring
January 12, 2012
Question

Need time tracker using phone call-in

  • January 12, 2012
  • 3 replies
  • 1689 views

I find myself in need of a tool that will allow our Home Health Aides to call in to a dedicated phone number, enter their employee number and a password, and record that information in a database.

The database would need to record the phone number that they called from, the employee number, and the date/time.

Ideally we would like a phone tree to allow for more options: Press 1 if you are arriving. Press 2 if you are leaving, etc. etc.

Anything out there that I can customize to my needs?

I am stuck on CF8, but realize it might not be a project that can be / should be solved with a CF solution.

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    3 replies

    K
    Kmed1
    Participant
    January 12, 2012

    TClaremont - I would recommend checking out a time tracking company called TSheets. They have dail in, text message, and smart phone capabilities to clock in and out specific to job code. Might be just what you're looking for!

    pete_freitag
    pete_freitag
    Participating Frequently
    January 12, 2012

    You will want to use something like Twilio or Voxeo for this, both should be pretty easy to integrate with your CF server. Your server basically serves up XML which tells the phone application what to do / say, and where to post the inputs from the end user to.

    tclaremont
    tclaremontAuthor
    Inspiring
    January 12, 2012

    Believe it or not, I am making some interesting progress. It might not pan out, but it is fun to give it a try.

    I created a Google Voice account. When I call my Google Voice number, I leave a message. Google then immedaitely transcribes the message and emails that transcription to a mailbox on my exhange server in a predictable format.

    Using CF's mail capabilities, I set up a scheduled task to monitor that inbox, and parse the messages as they come in. During the parsing, I extract the info I need and plop it into a database.

    This is all well and good, but it only seems to work for voice, and with unreliable dictation as you can imagine. If I could take this a step further and have my application say "Press 1 to register your arrival time"... "Press 2 to register your departure time" and then record what happens from there this might work. I dont think this is possible with Google Voice, however.

    Soooo, is there another application out there that will record DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency) keypresses and automatically email the info to me?

    ilssac
    ilssac
    Inspiring
    January 12, 2012

    Not by it self that is for sure.

    ColdFusion has NO telephony functionality and I doubt ever will.

    It does have SMS functionality so you might be able to do something with that?  If text messages could be used rather than phone messages.

    I suspect that there is telephony tools somewhere out there that is Java based.

    But ColdFusion is not going to do much with the phone.

    Now once you have the telephony functonality figured out, there is a good chance that ColdFusion could do some work in the middle tier and help you tie these new telephony tools into existing tools and front ends.

    But sorry, you will need to shop of something else or change your requirements.

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