VBVoice 5.0 Brings CT & VoIP to .NET Platform

OTTAWA, CANADA - Pronexus Inc., the provider of computer telephony software solutions, announced the release of VBVoice 5.0, the telephony development environment to leverage Microsoft Visual Studio.Net. VBVoice 5.0 has support for Voice over IP (VoIP), telephony controls such as speech recognition and text-to-speech and a scalable architecture. "Thousands of developers around the world have come to rely on VBVoice for their business critical computer telephony environments," said Gary T. Hannah, President and CEO of Pronexus. "VBVoice 5.0 sets a new bar: with its .NET integration, modular architecture and support for advanced telephony controls, it enables developers to rapidly deliver the complex voice applications that the marketplace demands - all without learning proprietary languages or APIs." Innovations in VBVoice 5.0 include: .NET support for maximum developer productivity
VBVoice 5.0 gives communications developers the freedom to choose among a variety of languages including Visual Basic 6.0, the object-oriented Visual Basic.NET and Visual C#. Its graphical user interface and programmable telephony controls combined with the debugging and coding tools of Visual Studio.NET simplify the process of creating, debugging and deploying communications applications. New telephony controls including VoIP, SpeechWorks OSR and web integration
VBVoice 5.0 provides developers with a range of controls for building telephony solutions. Standard telecom processes are organized into user-programmable ActiveX controls, and programs can call any .NET or ActiveX component directly, allowing for maximum extensibility and customization. New controls in VBVoice 5.0 include: Voice over IP
VBVoice 5.0 allows both inbound and outbound voice calls over the H.323 protocol. The integration of supported IP cards (Dialogic IP-Link, Aculab VoIP forthcoming) means that developers can continue to use existing VBVoice controls without regard for the underlying hardware. "The level of innovations in VBVoice 5.0 is impressive, and the integration with VoIP alone opens up a whole new market for us," commented John Pope, President and CTO of CenturiSoft, a California-based developer that is introducing Unified Communications (UC) systems to Enterprise and Carrier VoIP providers. "The support for VoIP will enable us to provide interoperability at the IP level and reduce customers' operating costs. Calls can now be received via the IP networks and seamlessly connected to the telco networks." Flexible Speech Recognition - (New: SpeechWorks OSR & Voice Commands) VBVoice allows for incorporating speech recognition into an application and VBVoice 5.0 adds integrated support for SpeechWorks OSR to its speech recognition capabilities. A new Voice Commands control enables developers to make system-wide voice commands (Help, Operator, etc.) available for the duration of a call without requiring additional recognition sessions. WebQuery Control
The optional WebQuery control allows data retrieval from any web site identified by a URL. This is useful for accessing directory information or other web publications for use in a VBVoice application. Distributed Architecture for High Volume Applications
For large-scale installations, VBVoice 5.0 introduces Modularity, an optional, distributed master/slave architecture. Developers can host system resources and services such as telephony hardware, TTS and ASR engines on one or more master machines while the applications themselves run in separate processes on separate machines. The communication across the network is completely transparent to the application logic, and debugging and development are the same as in stand-alone mode. This architecture provides developers with ultimate separation, load balancing, independent provisioning, hot swaps and reliability and scalability, all without additional programming overhead. "The master/slave architecture in VBVoice 5.0 allows us to create and deploy massively scalable applications in business justified increments," commented Larry Davis, President of HDI, a Richardson, Texas based provider of convergence solutions. "We are already planning to implement a series of dynamically allocated port farms that will serve as the telephony backbone for a wide variety of distributed applications across the country, and the modularity of VBVoice 5.0 lets us create solutions that can easily migrate to the technologies of the future." New Runtime Manager for developer flexibility and ease of deployment VBVoice 5.0 allows developers to create an application for a large number of lines. The development process and test mode does not require individual port licenses. This allows integrators to respond to large scale opportunities and move from small applications to large deployments and vice versa.