Daniel C. Swinehart

An overview of the Etherphone system and its applications

The Etherphone system has been developed to explore methods for extending existing multimedia office environments with the facilities needed to handle the transmission, storage, and manipulation of voice. Based on a hardware architecture that uses microprocessor-controlled telephones to transmit voice over an Ethernet that also supports a voice file server and a voice synthesis server, this system has been used for applications such as directory-based call placement, call logging, call filtering, and automatic call forwarding. Voice mail, voice annotation of multimedia documents, voice editing using standard text-editing techniques, and applications of synthetic voice use the Etherphones for voice transmission. Recent work has focused on the creation of a comprehensive voice system architecture, both to specify programming interfaces for custom uses of voice, and to specify the roles of different system components, so that equipment from multiple vendors could be integrated to provide sophisticated voice services.<<ETX>>