Rick Grehan
Visual Voice from Stylus Innovations is, at its core, just another Visual Basic custom control. Harness that, however, to the Visual Voice Workbench, and you've got a GUI-based applications development program that guides you through the creation of a complete Visual Basic-based telephony application. And when I say complete, I mean an application that can answer the phone, play audio files, record audio to disk, receive a fax, send a fax, decode Touch-Tones, hang up the phone, and probably more things that I haven't yet discovered.
Swimming about inside the Visual Voice VBX, you'll find actions and properties that allow your computer (via the proper hardware--I tested the Mwave version of the package) to perform all the audio magic ment
ioned above. The Workbench corrals all these together into three kinds of voice objects: voice files, voice strings, and voice queries. Voice files are simply digitized sound files (.WAV or .VOX files) that usually carry recordings like ``Press the star key for more information.'' A voice string is the concatenation of a number of voice files. A voice query is a series of actions that, in a nutshell, let the computer ask you a question and get an answer (usually from someone's Touch-Tone response).
When you get down to it, working with Visual Voice involves properly mixing the right sound files, Visual Voice VBX routines, and Visual Basic code. That's where the Workbench comes in.
For example, suppose your application is one of those ``here's what's playing'' recordings for a movie theater; only you want to let the caller select either matinee or evening shows via a Touch-Tone entry. Using the Visual Voice workbench, you would build a query consisting first of a voice file of you telling the cal
ler something like ``...for matinee shows, press 1.'' The Workbench's recording facilities let you sit at your machine with a microphone and ``build'' the file yourself. You then tell the query builder that, after playing the prompt message, the program should wait for and then receive a single DTMF digit tone. Finally, you instruct the query builder that the digit is to be converted to its numeric equivalent and stored into a variable to be used to route program flow to the proper routine.
Once you've pointed and clicked your way through the above steps, the Workbench will pour the appropriate BASIC code (complete with proper connections to the VBX) into the clipboard for you, and you can skip over to your Visual Basic application and paste it into the correct routine. About the only BASIC code you'll have to type in is End Sub.
Stylus Innovations (Cambridge, MA, (617) 621-9545) sells the Mwave version of Visual Voice for $495. For $200 more, you get an ACE (Advanced Communication Enhancement)
board, which is a DSP-based (digital signal processor) 16-bit board that produces just about every kind of audio signal there is, such as fax, modem (V.32 and V.42 bis), voice, and sound.
Illustration: The Visual Voice Workbench's recording facilities let you speak into a microphone and record a message that will play back to someone at the other end of a voice-response session.
Create Voice Response Applications Visually
