Virtual Page Station Controls
Video Transcript
00:06
Welcome back!
00:07
Okay, let’s dive into the virtual page station’s
00:10
control panel and start to make some noise.
00:13
I’m going to double-click my virtual page station and
00:15
zoom out a little bit.
00:17
All right, now we’ve got some controls here.
00:21
We’re going to actually expand this virtual
00:23
page station a little bit later,
00:25
and there’s going to be even more controls.
00:27
For now, let’s just keep it in its default mode,
00:29
and we’ll take a look at what each of these buttons does.
00:32
At the very top, you have a control section.
00:34
This is where you can start or cancel a page.
00:37
There are a couple of important LEDs here that
00:39
tell you the state of the system.
00:41
This is specifically about whether or not the zone
00:43
that you are trying to send a message to is busy or not.
00:46
It’ll tell you, “Hey, this is either busy or false,”
00:50
with a true or false LED. If it’s ready, you get an LED here,
00:53
and if you’re recording, you get true or false here.
00:55
Remember, anytime you see an LED in the system,
00:58
that is a control pin that you can expose.
01:01
That is a one and a zero, that is a true and a false.
01:03
You can use that to tie to logic anywhere else in the
01:07
system to have it do anything.
01:09
So, LEDs are more than just flashy lights.
01:11
I always want to remind people that you can use
01:13
them as calls to action to make any of your logic
01:16
do whatever it is you want to have happen.
01:18
But we can’t do anything yet.
01:19
The talk button is grayed out.
01:21
We need to configure where we want to send our
01:24
announcements before it’s ready to go.
01:25
So, for that, first, we’re going to dive to the bottom
01:27
of the control panel: the zone selection.
01:30
I have my five zones. You’ll notice that these are called
01:33
Zone 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
01:35
These did not get the names that we configured in the administrator,
01:40
and for that reason, these actually aren’t my favorite buttons.
01:42
I’m going to show you how you can use better buttons
01:44
than these a little bit later on,
01:45
but we’ll use these for now.
01:47
So, if I want to page the lobby,
01:48
I’m going to engage Zone 1.
01:50
If I look back up here, it says, “Please select priority.”
01:53
It’s kind of telling you why it’s not ready to send
01:56
out an announcement yet.
01:57
So, I look in this section here.
01:59
It says, “Priority.” I need to select a priority.
02:01
Nothing can go out if you have not selected a priority.
02:04
So, I’m going to send out a game over man-level announcement here.
02:09
Now it’s ready to go, and I have a button that says
02:11
“Talk.” It says “Talk” because we are currently in live mode.
02:17
The mode of what kind of announcement you’re
02:18
going to send is a dropdown menu.
02:21
I can click this and choose between live, auto, delay message, or loop message.
02:26
What does all this mean?
02:27
Well, live mode is the default one. That is a live page.
02:32
That’s when you’ve got a microphone, you talk into it,
02:34
and the page goes out. So, let’s do that first.
02:37
I’m going to put my hover monitor over my Lobby 1,
02:42
and let’s see if it works. I’m going to hit “Talk,”
02:47
talk into my microphone, and I’m done. It worked!
02:53
I saw those levels come through right on my Zone 1,
02:56
and the announcement was complete.
02:57
Not so bad.
02:59
Now, some people prefer to hold down a button
03:03
in order to talk into it rather than press it once to talk
03:07
and then press it a second time to disengage.
03:09
That’s what this knob here is for.
03:11
This 300 millisecond—
03:12
if you hold down this button for longer than 300 milliseconds,
03:16
it becomes a momentary button where you have to
03:19
keep on pressing it and then release it.
03:21
So, I can do this: I’m going to hold it down,
03:24
“This is my vocal page,” and release.
03:28
Now the page is complete, and that has been sent as well.
03:30
So, you’ve got a button that can operate in two different modes:
03:33
either it latches on, or it’s momentary, and you kind of
03:36
have to continue holding on to it. That’s your live page.
03:40
I could choose to change this to a delayed page,
03:44
and there’s a lot of good reasons why you might
03:46
want to change this to a delayed page.
03:49
A delayed page will record your voice and then send it
03:53
out as if it were a message after you’ve finished recording it.
03:58
Now, this is good for a couple of reasons.
03:59
If you’re recording it and you don’t like it,
04:01
you can hit the cancel button and then try again.
04:03
So, if you’re bad with your words and you’re not sure
04:05
you’re going to get the words out the way you want them to,
04:07
then you can make sure you have a couple of tries
04:09
before just being live onto the system.
04:11
But more importantly, if you do delay it,
04:15
then it is possible for that to go into the queuing system
04:18
if you’re sending it to a zone that’s busy.
04:21
If you’re doing a live page, it’s not recording you,
04:25
so you can only use a live page in a zone that is currently available.
04:30
Generally speaking, I’d say that you’d save live pages for emergencies
04:34
—something where you’ve got to say it right now and get it out immediately,
04:37
and it’s going to be the highest priority.
04:39
So, it’s going to override anything else that’s already playing,
04:42
and that way you don’t have to worry about it being
04:43
interrupted and whether or not it’s going to go into the queue.
04:46
Otherwise, I’d say delay is kind of the way to go.
04:49
There are exceptions to it, obviously.
04:51
It’s always up to your personal preference.
04:53
You’re at the airport,
04:54
you can see when they’re giving announcements and they’re just saying,
04:56
“Hey, we’re ready to take baggage.
04:59
If people want to come and give me their bags,”
05:02
they’re doing those as live pages because they just know their environment.
05:04
They know that they’re not going to be interrupted,
05:06
and they’re talking live.
05:07
But use it at your discretion.
05:10
Generally, I think delay is probably a better way to go.
05:13
There’s another option, though.
05:15
You could pick auto. What does auto mean?
05:20
Well, auto means that it will analyze the zone where it’s being sent,
05:26
and if the zone is available, it will go out as a live page.
05:30
If the zone is unavailable, it will go out as a delayed page.
05:34
So, it will get out as quickly as possible based
05:37
on what the zone is or is not doing.
05:39
Maybe that’s the behavior that you prefer.
05:42
However, there’s a downside to that as well.
05:44
If you are a receptionist who isn’t really familiar
05:47
with the way this system works, and you hit that button,
05:50
and sometimes your mic is hot and you’re talking live,
05:53
and sometimes it’s recording you and it’s delayed and it goes out a little bit later,
05:57
and you don’t really understand why,
05:59
that might be confusing to the receptionist who’s sending that out.
06:02
So, maybe auto is not the right choice depending on who’s using it.
06:06
You’ve got the options, is the point.
06:07
You can choose which one of these you’re going to use.
06:10
For each of these, you also have the option to engage a preamble.
06:14
A preamble is a short, usually musical ditty that occurs
06:21
before the announcement goes out.
06:23
This is important, especially for things like a mall or a hotel.
06:29
If you’re giving an announcement,
06:30
you’ve got to get people’s attention first.
06:32
If you just start talking, people are in mid-conversation.
06:35
They don’t know
06:35
—they’re not ready to hear their voice being announced
06:38
and being called to the front desk.
06:39
They’re doing something else.
06:40
So, get their attention first.
06:42
We have preambles here.
06:43
Now, there are two fields here.
06:45
The first field is a subdirectory of preambles.
06:48
We’re going to look in the core manager and its file structure.
06:51
If you have different types of preambles, you can create subfolders.
06:56
If you don’t, then just go right here to the general preamble folder.
06:59
These are all the preambles that come on the system,
07:02
along with a couple that I added.
07:04
All the ones that come on the system are terrible.
07:09
They’re terrible.
07:12
I don’t know what low-budget,
07:16
failing magic store’s discount wacky sound effects CD bin
07:23
we stole from to get these sound effects,
07:27
but every one is worse than the last.
07:30
Do you want to start your announcements with a bike horn double?
07:35
I’ll tell you the answer: you don’t.
07:37
I know that. Do you want to hear it? I’ll show it to you.
07:39
We’re going to go into delay mode,
07:40
and I’m going to send this announcement.
07:42
I’m going to record it.
07:43
That was the worst thing we ever heard, right?
07:46
Wait for it. Here it comes.
07:49
That was the worst thing we ever heard, right?
07:52
Yeah, yeah, that’s an option in cues. I don’t know why.
07:58
This has to be a joke from the developers.
08:01
I don’t know how they’re still in here.
08:03
Do you want to use the alarm beeps? Eight?
08:09
Yeah, nobody wanted that. Give it a listen.
08:17
Yeah, nobody wanted that, right?
08:20
Don’t use these. Don’t use them.
08:23
Make your own. Use your own.
08:25
I’ve got some that I created called our Facebook Hotel Preamble.
08:29
We’re going to use those.
08:30
This is the way people know they’re going to be part of Fake Hotel.
08:34
Thank you for coming to Fake Hotel.
08:37
Listen to this nice one:
08:39
“An announcement from Fake Hotel. Thank you for coming to Fake Hotel.”
08:43
Yeah, that’s the way to go. Make your own preambles.
08:45
Please don’t use the ones that we gave you.
08:47
Again, those preambles are available for you.
08:49
They’re on the core manager,
08:51
and I’ll show you that in just one second.
08:54
The last thing to consider is your max page duration.
08:56
You can change how long a page could last,
08:59
and then it’ll cut it off if someone goes too long.
09:02
That’s really important because sometimes people might
09:04
hit a button and then accidentally walk away from the desk,
09:06
leaving the mic open and not realizing it.
09:09
So, you might want to limit it to make sure it
09:10
automatically cuts off at a certain time.
09:12
Otherwise, they could just keep it not limited,
09:15
and it’s going to stay indefinitely. So, don’t do that.
09:19
Those are the three paging options.
09:21
Options four and five are for messages.
09:24
So, I could select “Message.”
09:26
When I’m in message mode,
09:28
then I have access to these other fields over here.
09:31
These are very similar to the preamble folder structure,
09:33
where you’ve got a subfolder and then the folder of your announcements.
09:38
Here, I have pre-loaded a couple of announcements to my core.
09:41
I’m going to pick the valet one.
09:45
If you don’t know how to load audio files to the core,
09:47
let’s do that right now.
09:48
You can go to your core manager either by
09:50
selecting the name of your core in the top corner
09:53
while it’s running, or you could go to Tools > Show Core Manager.
09:58
You could input the IP address of your core.
10:00
However you get there, you’re going to be
10:01
greeted with your core manager screen,
10:04
and on that screen is a tab called “Files.”
10:07
We’ll go from Files, and here are all the audio files on the core.
10:12
The ones that are explicitly for the paging system
10:15
are segregated there for a reason.
10:17
There’s a folder called “Messages.”
10:19
Here in the Messages folder,
10:21
these are the only messages that the PA system can have access to.
10:28
It cannot go back and look into your audio folder;
10:30
it has to be in the Messages folder.
10:32
So here, if I made a subfolder,
10:34
maybe I had some seasonal announcements,
10:38
and then we’ll open up that.
10:42
If I’m going to add some,
10:43
I’ll add a file to that subdirectory there,
10:47
and then when I go up,
10:48
that subdirectory is now going to be visible within your design.
10:53
So, let me hop back over there,
10:55
and if I go to the message field,
10:57
you can see that now I can see my subdirectories,
11:00
and I can choose my subdirectory and then any
11:02
message that is in that subdirectory.
11:03
That’s what those fields are there for.
11:05
I’m going to keep it on my root directory,
11:08
and we’ll play that valet announcement.
11:10
The same is true for the preambles.
11:12
If you go up a tier, then you have a preambles folder.
11:17
This is where I added my Fake Hotel options,
11:20
and once again, this is where all of the pre-existing preambles are.
11:23
You can also choose to audition these by
11:27
hitting the play button right here and choosing a terrible preamble.
11:36
Other than that, you’ll also notice the page archives folder.
11:40
That’s the folder where the pages get saved
11:42
if you have indeed chosen to archive them at
11:44
every single or at the relevant priority level.
11:48
All right, so let’s hop back over here and make sure that our message works.
11:52
So, I’m going to play my message to Zone 1.
11:56
Here’s something interesting:
11:58
now that we’re in message mode,
12:00
this button says something different, doesn’t it?
12:03
It used to say “Talk.” It said “Talk” when it was in live mode,
12:07
and when we changed it to delay, it went to “Record.”
12:12
The legend of this button has changed.
12:17
The legend is the control tree of a control that dictates what its label is.
12:22
So, part of the scripting that happens under the hood
12:24
as you change the mode is that the legend of that particular button
12:28
will update so that the user knows what verb they are about to do in the world.
12:32
Are they going to talk?
12:33
Are they going to record something?
12:35
Are they going to play something?
12:36
And in fact, if you go to loop message mode,
12:39
which we’ll talk about in a bit, it now says “Loop.”
12:41
Now, the benefit of this is that you’ve got an
12:43
adaptive button that is really useful to the user
12:46
so they know what they’re doing.
12:47
The downside is that if you grab this control,
12:49
pull it out of this control panel,
12:50
and put it on a UCI, you can’t rename it.
12:54
If you try to rename it,
12:55
that legend will still be re-updated when you’re changing modes,
12:59
and it’ll be overridden.
13:00
So, that’s this control.
13:03
If you want to make your own name or your
13:06
own verb for the button,
13:07
you’re going to have to create your own
13:08
control and then use a control pin to wire it to this
13:11
technically a talk button.
13:13
But we’re just going to use it as it is.
13:15
Let me put this back to my message mode and
13:18
make sure that my message works.
13:20
I’ll hit “Play” right here to Zone 1:
13:22
“An announcement from Fake Hotel. Ladies and gentlemen,
13:27
if you have left your vehicle with the valet, Fake Hotel would
13:30
like to remind you that we do not have a valet service,
13:33
and you have been robbed. Thank you.”
13:36
Yep, that’s our announcement.
13:37
All right, the other version of sending a message
13:40
is to go to the loop message.
13:42
As I mentioned, in loop message mode, watch this.
13:44
Watch the control panel.
13:46
What changes in the control panel as you change
13:48
modes in message mode versus loop mode?
13:53
What changed? Did you see it?
13:54
Here, I’ll show you again: message versus loop.
13:57
Two different things happened.
13:59
The max page duration changed, and the retry button disengaged.
14:03
Why? When we’re in loop mode,
14:06
then you can choose a max page duration because
14:08
what’s going to happen is the announcement will play,
14:11
and then it will play again, and it will play again,
14:13
and it will loop endlessly until you hit your max page duration.
14:17
So, this is for sending out an announcement
14:19
that you want to just stay on repeat for a very long time.
14:22
And obviously, if that’s the case, then you would
14:24
not be retrying this because it doesn’t even
14:26
make sense to retry something that is happening endlessly.
14:29
So, that’s our loop message mode.
14:30
I won’t hit play on this one.
14:31
I think you can understand what that is.