SMS to speech

Legacy Open AT
1

Hello everybody,

when we are sending an SMS from our device with Wavecom module to a phone in the conventional telephone network in Germany using either T-D1 or Vodafone-D2 as mobile provider, the SMS will be rendered in speech and read out on the receiving phone.

So far, so good!

When a customer in Austria tried this using our device (with Q2406B module) and A1 as mobile provider, he will not get the spoken text. In fact he will not get any indication on the convetional destination phone. But when he transfers the SIM card into a cell phone and sends an SMS from the cell phone to the same conventional phone it does work! The SMS will be read! So it does work as desired from a commercial mobile phone but does not work from our emergency phone using the Wavecom module.

And these two other scenarios also do not work:

  • Sending SMS from mobile with Wavecom module in Germany to conventional phone in Austria

  • Sending SMS from commercial mobile phone in Austria to conventional phone in Germany

This is what we use in our emergency phone:
Q2406B
Firmware: 640b09gg.Q2406B 1272884 070403 16:03
OpenAT 2.0
(SMS is sent in text mode)

I’m really clueless here… The only thing I am sure of is that the Wavecom module does not do the text-to-speech function. Do you know who does? Is it the mobile phone network operator, or the conventional telephone network operator? Is it possible that this depends on the country? Are there any settings one should set in order to ensure it works? Is it possible that it would work when sending SMS in PDU mode instead of text mode? Or does it require SIM-Toolkit functions we do not use?

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Best Regards,
Jan

2

Hello Jan,

I’m sure its the conventional telephone network operator that takes care of this.

But I dont know any details so I guess the best way is to contact them and try to get some kind of specification that describes the requirements.

/Snoooze

3

Hi Snooze,

I thought it might be, but when we tried with the two different mobile network operators in Germany, the messages were different and acually one was read clearly and nice and the other one sounded more like coming from a machine. I think there shouldn’t be such a difference when it is done by the local phone company…

Best Regards,
Jan

4

Repost… (original message was lost…)

Hi again,

we found out, what the problem was in Austria:

If we send an SMS to a land line phone, it will NOT work if we use the country code (e.g. +436621234567) to send SMS from the mobile phone – but if we use the number local to the country (e.g. 06621234567) it WILL work!!

Almost funny, isn’t it?

Best Regards,
Jan

5

yeah, thats strange…

I made some research and I found out that there is a service called F-SMSC (fixed line SMS Central) and this is something that can be provided to fixed PSTN lines by companies like Alterbox, Telenity and Meterna (AnnyWay) etc…
They provide either standard text messaging or text-to-speech.

For more information and maybe an explanation to your initial questions take a look in:
ETSI ES 201 912 (V1.1.1) – “Short Message Communication between a fixed network Short Message Terminal Equipment and a Short Message Service Centre”

I also tried to send a SMS to a German analogue phone (that also is working with SMS-to-speech) from outside Germany but it didn’t work.
Maybe its something blocking at the border…

/Snoooze

6

Hi Snooze,

Thanks so much for your research!

Hmmm… Maybe they assume that international delivery is in a foreign language which can not be processed by local speech generation…

Best Regards,
Jan