Even though the telephone is slowly succumbing to the forces of email, texting, and Instagram, calling still has its uses. Customer support is one of those major uses, and it comes with a lot of time spent waiting for a prompter to recite the menu.

“For billing information, press 1. To see your current balance, press 2. For more options, press 3”, recites the prompter in their never-changing voice. This is just one of the menus that a user might go through just to reach customer support.

Would it not be faster then, if one could send a textual menu to a telephone instead of having to speak out every word? No, I’m not talking about texting, email, or IM. Those services use an additional data plan that doesn’t come with voice calling. Instead, I’m saying we should update the current phone infrastructure to be able to send text. If we can take a person’s voice, translate it into 1s and 0s, and send it whizzing through the air to the person on the other end, why can’t we do that with text?

Most phones these days have some sort of screen. Even my handset at home has a little display screen where I can view recent calls, contacts and messages. We could take advantage of the phone’s screen and use it to display messages from the caller.

While it would be up to the phone’s firmware to display messages, the protocol for sending text over a phone line would be consistent. We could use the already-existing Unicode character mapping to encode characters into binary. Since Unicode contains the character set of every language imaginable, this system could have a worldwide implementation.

Support for text formatting could be introduced after plain text has a successful run in the customer support market. Then, one could add on colors, font sizes, and all of the basic formatting that you’d find in a modern text processing application.

What about those really old telephones that don’t have display screens, or the handsets that have only rudimentary black and white display? For the screen-less telephones, users would still hear voice prompts so long as customer support on the other end hasn’t done away with such. As for the latter, it is up to the screen limitations on the telephone to dictate what it can display. If the screen can only display 32 characters at a time and can’t do formatting or text coloring, at least it can still display text.

Currently, phones on the user’s end do not have the capability to parse text sent over a phone line. However, this system doesn’t require a total overhaul of phone design. For smartphone users, there will be an app for that. For landlines, the transition would be a bit slower, but it will happen as new handsets replace the old. It’s like what happened when color TV came out in the 1930s, or more recently, 3-D TV. New models of TVs were made to support the new standards, as older models were phased out. The same can be done with phones.

Having textual menus would be massively beneficial for users. Instead of waiting for 10 or 15 seconds for a prompter, the user could read text on the screen and press a number on the keypad. The biggest advantage of textual menus is saving time, and in a world where time seems to be getting shorter and shorter, this is something we definitely need.

Published by Geoffrey Liu

A software engineer by trade and a classical musician at heart. Currently a software engineer at Groupon getting into iOS mobile development. Recently graduated from the University of Washington, with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Music. Web development has been my passion for many years. I am also greatly interested in UI/UX design, teaching, cooking, biking, and collecting posters.

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