Version 3.4 also includes new service for a mass emergency information hotline
From the ACUTA 2011 Conference, a major advancement has been added an option to broadcast mass alerts at an unprecedented speed in the TTY (Text Telephony) protocol to TTY/TDD devices for the deaf and hearing impaired. Also included in the release is the launch of a brand new service called Hotline™ that offers a massively scalable inbound emergency information hotline for students and others to call and retrieve recorded alert messages at their own convenience.
The start of a larger initiative, Omnilert now provides an optional dedicated Broadcast TTY service. The new TTY-based alerts broadcast on a groundbreaking new scale, with the ability to reach thousands of TTY/TDD devices a minute. “Omnilert is leading the charge for accessible emergency alerting,” said Nick Gustavsson, chief technology officer at Omnilert. “Thanks to the amazing scale of our network, we are able to provide perfect Broadcast TTY services that are several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything available until now. We believe that every student needs to be alerted of an emergency.”
Hotline is an optional add-on service that enables a school’s community to call a special dedicated number to hear an alert message. Unlike traditional call answering systems, this new service provides expansive capacity to handle thousands of incoming calls without busy signals or putting callers on-hold. Gustavsson continued, “Whereas most hotlines will produce a busy signal after just a few callers, with Omnilert Hotline, 1000s of callers can hear the emergency message without ever receiving a busy signal. It is truly a remarkable service that is only possible from the nation’s largest and most advanced emergency notification network.”
Other updates in version 3.4 include new graphs for delivery statistics and the ability to customize SMS headers.
To improve incident reporting, the new Delivery Stats Graphs are printable reports that provide the totals for each message delivery status, plus a pie chart visual showing the breakdown.
SMS text message alerts are limited to a total of 160 characters, but in a crisis, every character counts. Previously, all clients were required to include SMS headers (e.g. FR:, SUBJ:, and MSG:) with every text alert. The new uAlert version 3.4 allows administrators to customize or remove these SMS Headers to allot more characters for the content of the message.
