Introduction:
The computer telephony market has grown extensively in the past few years. You can now find Windows-based Answering Machines and NT-based PBXs, but there are relatively few Voice applications available for Unix or GNU/Linux. Commercially, there are a variety of Voice related products which run on SCO Unixware on hardware from voice board vendors such as Dialogic (see links below). Commercial Unix-based Voicemail Systems from telephone equipment manufacturers such as Lucent have been on the market for years, but those solutions tend to be expensive.
In recent years, voice capable modems opened up an opportunity for low cost platform independent voice processing, but software across the board was weak at best, especially the commercial software for Windows platforms using Windows APIs. The best bet for dealing with voice was to use a dedicated board from a hardware vendor who had a developers kit for your platform.
By the 1997 timeframe, the free software community enhanced the well known mgetty+sendfax program with vgetty voice extensions providing a C source code and library for voice processing.
Now, in the year 2000, the Bayonne project is underway and Voice processing for Unix (using freely available software) has advanced to a new level. Bayonne is the multi-line "voice response" telephony server of the GNU project. Bayonne's purpose as a "telephony" server is to provide a service daemon which can automatically process telephone callers on a GNU operating system in an extensible manner. Bayonne uses extension scripting to specify and control call flow, and is suitable for building applications such as "Interactive Voice Response", telephone based system administration and control, and voice messaging such as "voice mail". Bayonne can be implemented on systems ranging from small embedded servers up to offering a platform for deployment of "enhanced" carrier services.
In addition to scripting, Bayonne is fully modular and can be integrated with many common GNU system services. Perl and system applications can be invoked through "TGI" (Telephony Gateway Interface) offering web integration and v-commerce solutions. Plugins can be developed to directly extend the Bayonne server and to introduce services not even envisioned today.
Bayonne is written entirely in C++, uses a fully threaded script driven state-event call server at the core for SMP performance, and is itself built entirely from DSO components that are selected and loaded at runtime, much like what XFree 4.x does for graphic drivers.
Web Resources:
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1. Bayonne http://www.bayonne.cx
http://bayonne.sourceforge.net
ftp://www.voxilla.org/pub/bayonne
2. Voxilla http://www.voxilla.org
3. GNUCOMM http://www.fsf.org/software/gnucomm/gnucomm.html
4. Vgetty http://alpha.greenie.net/vgetty
5. Linux Telephony http://linuxtelephony.org
6. comp.dcom.telecom news:comp.dcom.telecom
7. comp.dcom.telecom.tech news:comp.dcom.telecom.tech
8. Telecom Information Resources http://china.si.umich.edu/telecom
9. The Telecom Archives
http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives
10. CommWeb http://www.commweb.com
11. Computer Telephony Magazine http://www.computertelephony.com
12. Internet Telephony Magazine http://www.itmag.com
13. Internet Telecom Expo http://www.i-telecomexpo.com
14. SCO's Telephony Page http://www.sco.com/telephony
15. SCO's Telecom Parter Page
http://www.sco.com/telephony/telepartners.html
16. Dialogic http://www.dialogic.com
General Interest Links:
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17. GNU http://www.gnu.org http://www.fsf.org
18. Open Source Development Network http://osdn.com
19. Source Forge http://sourceforge.net
20. FreshMeat http://freshmeat.net
21. SlashDot http://www.slashdot.org
22. NewsForge http://www.newsforge.com
23. Linux Router Project http://www.linuxrouter.org
24. Tucows LWN http://www.lwn.net
Description of Talk:
David will give a general overview of the telecom market and why free software is important to it. The history of Bayonne, current status, and future plans will be discussed. This includes the project's discussion with the CMU folks to roll out Bayonne hosted Sphinx ASR services and festival servers for voice web browsing. The talk will be free form with Q&A sections.
Our speaker also participates in the Linux Router Project and the Embedded Linux Consortium. He will say a few words about these projects as well.
Speaker Biography:
(Modified from http://www.ostel.com/about.html)
David Sugar is the Chief Technology Officer of Open Source Telecom Corporation. He has been actively involved in both the formative years of personal computer technology and later in the development of computer based telephony systems. While with Panasonic, Mr. Sugar was involved in the design, implementation, and bringing to market of an entirely new family of PC integrated voice messaging and ACD products for the Panasonic DBS. In more recent years, Mr. Sugar has contributed to the development of biometric technology and, while director of software development for Fortran Corp., was responsible for the development of single-point-of-entry network management tools for PBX systems that are used to maintain the communications infrastructure of several prominent federal agencies, including the SEC and Social Security Administration, as well as the Federal Reserve board. He is also the author of many free software projects, including ACS and Bayonne, powerful free telecommunications servers. He has been involved with the free software movement since before the evolution of the current crop of free operating systems, writing programs to perform as bulletin boards, getty's, text-to-speech engines, and switch interface daemons, to name a few. David was recently elected to represent the software community in the International Softswitch Consortium and is an active member of the Embedded Linux Consoritum.
Complimentary Refreshments and Food will be served.
This now includes salads and sandwiches (eg. turkey, roast beef, chicken, tuna)!
Please join us for this meeting, you won't want to miss it!
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