VOICE AND TELEPHONY APPLICATIONS FOR THE OFFICE WORKSTATION.

Abstract

An overview of recent work on an audio and telephony subsystem for an advanced office workstation is presented. This subsystem provides voice functions that allow speech synthesis from text and speech digitization for storage and retrieval of voice. It also provides telephony functions for two telephone lines with several telephony features including autodial, autoanswer, progress tone detection, voice detection, and touch to the detection. Furthermore, low-speed communications are also available for use over telephone lines. The applications programmed for this subsystem use the many other services now commonly available in office workstations, such as file systems, network subsystems, and display managers for bit-map displays with windows, menus, and mouse input. Integrated voice and telephony applications for the office are discussed. A future integrated environment is emphasized with networks that transport data and digitized voice. These networks will have consolidated telephony and other server features. Further servers on the network may include voice (file or mail) servers, text-to-speech synthesis servers, and even continuous speech recognition servers.