Subject: From: Date:

Re: [ECS] Phone-C Gerry Duprey Sun, 23 Aug 1998 20:48:03 -0400 (EDT)

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>   IF and WHEN Mark has time/desire to tackle this job, I think he should
> seriously look at true telephony boards (such as Dialogic) and existing
> developer kits (such as Visual Voice for VisualBasic) rather than one
> obscure (possibly soon obsolete?) modem with custom firmware.

I'd agree.  I have been using/programming a Dialogic Proline 2/V (their
two line/base board, about $400) for a few months.  After having nothing
but problems with various TAPI based modems, I went with Dialogic and the
difference is night and day.

Even using TAPI (Dialogic provides their own TAPI driver - no Unimodem/V
crap), things are rock solid reliable.  Using a "shell" like Visual Voice
(not cheap (about $500), but royalty free) makes it pathetically simple to
write really full-featured telephony aps that just don't die, act funny,
etc.

The Dialogic board does not emulate a modem - it actually can't do data
connections (though it can do fax).  It can manage two seperate lines
simultaneously and you can add additional boards (upto 8 for 16 lines) and
they all share the same IRQ.  You can (if you get into using their direct
API) conference between the lines.  Using this, you can effectivly make a
small PBX using your PC.  If you need more lines, they have higher density
boards (up to 128 lines per board) that using the same API (so no
reprogramming). 

I wrote my own "answering machine" a while back that intelligently handled
calls based on caller ID (different messages, etc), calls the local
theaters at 2AM (when their schedule lines are finally not busy) and
records the schedules to play back later and have recently started playing
with having an incoming call "transfered" to wherever I am (using the
second line to call out and cross-connect the lines).

Using these things for a while shows what a hack most voice modems really
are, especially when you start trying to get reliable, long-term operation
out of them.

Sorry for the long spiel, but these things saved me from going bonkers
after a 3 month struggle with voice modems and I just get carried away
when I start talking about them.  Rhetorex is not quite a popular as
Dialog, but also produce a very high quality telephony board.

Gerry Duprey                     EMAIL: gerry@msage.com 
Micro Sage Software Systems      VOICE: (734) 663-0444
130 South First Street             WWW: http://www.msage.com/~gerry
Ann Arbor, MI 48104 USA

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