What does Freedom Fone do?

Freedom Fone allows anyone with a phone to access or contribute information on a specific issue 24 hours a day and seven days a week. It takes advantage of audio and text to address language and literacy barriers when reaching out to marginalised audiences that don't have access to other media. No internet access is required by either you or your audience for this.

Freedom Fone uses interactive voice menus to deliver information to and record information from a caller. You will be familiar with this kind of menu already: "press 1 to access your account, press 2 to speak to a representative, press 3 to record a message...". We all sometimes have to deal with this kind of system when we dial a number to top up the credit on our mobile phone account, or to talk to a support person, etc.

Freedom Fone enables you to design your own interactive menus to:

• Share audio information with your audience; this audio information can take many forms including voice menu (press 1, press 2, etc.), educational dramas, short news items, or even a song!
• Organise a poll to enable your audience to vote on an issue using their phone;
• Collect SMSs from your audience - these might be updates about specific news events, alerts or similar time critical information;
• Get your audience to leave audio messages to share their opinion on a particular topic or make reports in their own language.

There are no geographical limitations to Freedom Fone. In fact it can be used and deployed in all countries where there is mobile network coverage, and content can be recorded in any language - even multiple languages, simultaneously.

In addition to ordinary mobile phones, your callers can use landlines and internet-based phones to access the service. This means that Freedom Fone can receive and deliver crucial information via mobile phones or landlines in situations facing power constraints or where the Internet access is limited or interrupted.

Freedom Fone provides an installer that automates much of the setup, empowering a non-technical user to independently set up a sophisticated telephony server in under 30mins.

Once you're set up, an easy graphical user interface lets you control everything you want to do through a simple 'dashboard'.

Please note: Freedom Fone also has some security features but please be aware that all phones and telephony services have security issues. We have provided chapters in this book that cover this issue from different perspectives. If security is an issue for you or your callers please read this material.