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Computertelephony applicatlon generators from Apex, InterVoice, MediaSoft, and Brooktrout build phone applications faster.
The long-hyped "convergence" of computers and telephones has arrived, but without the sexiness and flash that had been promised. Instead, it has come in the form of practical tools for building computer-telephony applications voice-mail, voice-response, and fax-back applications, for example. And those tools are getting easier to use. A short while back (Sept. 29, p. 73), I looked at computer-telphony ActiveX controls. Though those tools provide an easy way to create complex telephony applications, they require you to create your own programs in an application development tool like C++ or Visual Basic. And while there are canned telephony applications for those who don't want to code, they lack flexibility of custom applications. If you want to write a lot less code but still be able to create the type of phone application you need, you can buy a telephony application generator - a diagram-based develpment environment with predefined telephony "blocks" or objects. By configuring the properties or adding action code to the blocks and connecting them to other blocks in a diagram, you can create custom telephony applications that can be "generated" as executable applications and installed on a telephony server. For this review, I looked at four telephony application-generator products: OmniVox for Windows NT by Apex Voice Communications Inc., InVision by InterVoice Inc., IVS Builder by MediaSoft Telecom, and Show N Tel by Brooktrout Technology Inc. Although each of these products is available for sale to the general user, these companies prefer to sell their products to valueadded resellers who then use them to create customized telephony applications. This lack of direct interaction with end users is evident in the problems I found with several of the products.
My test server and development system ran Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 with 64 Mbytes of RAM, a large disk, and a Dialogic VFX/40ESC+ voice-fax board. All four products require a security "dongle" that attaches to the printer port on the deployment system.
My system didn't have an available interrupt for my voice board, so I had to disable its remote-access modem to have a spare interrupt for my voice board. My server doesn't need a printer, so if these packages didn't require...