Telephony
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Hi. I have been asked to develop my first telephony application. I think I want to do it with Visual C++ or Visual Basic.NET. The application: A program that will let the user dial in to his/her voice mail and access all of the features of the voice mail throught the computer. Does anyone know of existing libraries that might be helpful? Do we need a special modem? Does anyone know if it might be easier to implement in another language? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Hi. I have been asked to develop my first telephony application. I think I want to do it with Visual C++ or Visual Basic.NET. The application: A program that will let the user dial in to his/her voice mail and access all of the features of the voice mail throught the computer. Does anyone know of existing libraries that might be helpful? Do we need a special modem? Does anyone know if it might be easier to implement in another language? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
SuperGeek wrote: A program that will let the user dial in to his/her voice mail and access all of the features of the voice mail throught the computer. If by this description you mean that the user should be able to pick up his phone and use the computer program to dial VM and interact with it via the DTMF menus that the user would normally press then it is not too difficult. Depending upon the OSs that you need to support, take a look at Tapi (V2 or V3). V3 places a COM wrapper around Tapi making it a bit more VB friendly that V2 was. V2 was/is very difficult to use via VB because of it's extensive use of pointers, variable length structs (requiring much use of memcopy) and callback functions. If by this description you mean that you want to make messages left in a users mailbox available via some GUI interface, then things can get much prettier or much uglier, depending on the VM system you are working with.... If the VM stores it's messages in a open store (DB or directory structure) and in some format that you can get a coder to play, then it might not be tooooo difficult. These types of systems are called 'Unified Messaging’ (UM), and generally are developed as part of the VM platform itself as a value-added feature (to get more money). You might not be able to get things too tightly coupled if this is your intent unless the VM maker has designed the system to be open and extensible (don’t know many that do). If low cost UM is what you are after, you might just be better off writing your own from scratch. Trust me when I say this.. I help folks do things like this for a living. It MIGHT just be simpler to start over :-D
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SuperGeek wrote: A program that will let the user dial in to his/her voice mail and access all of the features of the voice mail throught the computer. If by this description you mean that the user should be able to pick up his phone and use the computer program to dial VM and interact with it via the DTMF menus that the user would normally press then it is not too difficult. Depending upon the OSs that you need to support, take a look at Tapi (V2 or V3). V3 places a COM wrapper around Tapi making it a bit more VB friendly that V2 was. V2 was/is very difficult to use via VB because of it's extensive use of pointers, variable length structs (requiring much use of memcopy) and callback functions. If by this description you mean that you want to make messages left in a users mailbox available via some GUI interface, then things can get much prettier or much uglier, depending on the VM system you are working with.... If the VM stores it's messages in a open store (DB or directory structure) and in some format that you can get a coder to play, then it might not be tooooo difficult. These types of systems are called 'Unified Messaging’ (UM), and generally are developed as part of the VM platform itself as a value-added feature (to get more money). You might not be able to get things too tightly coupled if this is your intent unless the VM maker has designed the system to be open and extensible (don’t know many that do). If low cost UM is what you are after, you might just be better off writing your own from scratch. Trust me when I say this.. I help folks do things like this for a living. It MIGHT just be simpler to start over :-D
Thanks for advice. I will have to look into the TAPI. I would prefer to work in VB or VB.NET. The application is really supposed to be a GUI that let the operator here voice mail and exercise the options in the voice mail. I do not think we are going to be supporting any sort of database. We are dialing the voice mailbox, sending the tones through the phone line, for example if the option is press 2 for "To Reply to this Message" the user could click a button for reply and the software would send the tone for two. I think we can get by with only supporting windows 2000 or XP.
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Thanks for advice. I will have to look into the TAPI. I would prefer to work in VB or VB.NET. The application is really supposed to be a GUI that let the operator here voice mail and exercise the options in the voice mail. I do not think we are going to be supporting any sort of database. We are dialing the voice mailbox, sending the tones through the phone line, for example if the option is press 2 for "To Reply to this Message" the user could click a button for reply and the software would send the tone for two. I think we can get by with only supporting windows 2000 or XP.
Take a look at this example: User Sample from GotDotnet.com[^] It is C# but should not be toooo difficult to convert (or turn into a VB callable assymbly)
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Hi. I have been asked to develop my first telephony application. I think I want to do it with Visual C++ or Visual Basic.NET. The application: A program that will let the user dial in to his/her voice mail and access all of the features of the voice mail throught the computer. Does anyone know of existing libraries that might be helpful? Do we need a special modem? Does anyone know if it might be easier to implement in another language? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
THANKS! I have never seen that gotdotnet site before, I think I may start spending some time there. I think TAPI is definetly the way to go, (assuming I have a modem that supports TAPI). Does anyone know of any good books or websites that detail the TAPI functions?
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Hi. I have been asked to develop my first telephony application. I think I want to do it with Visual C++ or Visual Basic.NET. The application: A program that will let the user dial in to his/her voice mail and access all of the features of the voice mail throught the computer. Does anyone know of existing libraries that might be helpful? Do we need a special modem? Does anyone know if it might be easier to implement in another language? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Ok, I am halfway done for implementing my telephony application and I encountered a major problem. I am using a ZOOM USB Modem and was stunned to learn that it is half duplex. When I dial the phone, and the voice mail answers I can set tones and transmit voice, but I cannot hear what is going on at the other end. How do I switch from a send state to listening state?