A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY (aka Visual Voice, RIP)
Visual Voice was a popular computer telephony toolkit, developed by Stylus Innovation in 1993 and subsequently purchased by Artisoft in 1996. eurovoice were the main resellers of Visual Voice in Europe from version 1.0 in 1993. We also assisted many customers with development of bespoke solutions using Visual Voice.
Early in 2000, Dialogic - who at that time were owned by Intel Corporation - acquired the Visual Voice computer telephony toolkit software from Artisoft. Dialogic had previously acquired Parity Software Development Corporation including its CallSuite Computer Telephony toolkit software. The acquisition of both products (Visual Voice and CallSuite) was promoted as part of Dialogic's ongoing strategy to provide a robust variety of toolkits to meet the needs of developers building Computer Telephony applications. Both the Visual Voice and CallSuite products have historically provided similar ActiveX component-based capabilities. In June 2000, Dialogic began shipping Version 7.0 of its Parity CallSuite, Graphical VOS, and VOS toolkits, which provided significant new capabilities for developers. With the release of these products, Dialogic made the decision to discontinue sales of the Visual Voice product suite effective from July 1, 2000.
Effective from that date, Dialogic provided customer support to Visual Voice customers at no charge for a limited duration, but that support period has long since expired. Visual Voice customers who wished to upgrade their applications to support more lines were able to continue to purchase 'Line Extenders', until June 2001. Hence, these are no longer available.
eurovoice, an established reseller of the Visual Voice product since 1993, was disappointed with the handling of that product transition, in particular the zero notice of product discontinuation and inconsistency of timescales. We worked hard to improve such communication issues and were able to resolve many customer concerns as swiftly as possible.
From July 2000 through to June 2001 many of our customers upgraded to CallSuite version 7, as this offered similar functionality to Visual Voice with a similar run-time royalty free licencing model. However, in June 2001, with the release of the subsequent version of CallSuite (which was rebranded to become CTADE version 8 and combined with Parity's VOS product), the licencing model reverted to an industry standard per-port fee payable for run-time systems.
So the key issues facing users of the Visual Voice toolkit were:-
1. The last supported configuration of Visual Voice was version 5 with Service Pack 3. This worked with Microsoft Windows NT version 4 with Service Pack 5 and Dialogic DNA 3.3, without the DNA 3.3 service pack). These Dialogic drivers are no longer supported and Microsoft has since withdrawn support of Windows NT.
2. Dialogic hardware developed after DNA 3.3 was not supported - this includes the entire JCT family of cards.
3. Visual Voice was not designed to work with Windows 2000, let alone XP or Windows 2003 Server, or later.
OUR SOLUTION
Since October 2002, eurovoice have been supplying eurovoice objects, a run-time royalty-free .NET based computer telephony toolkit that offers an easy migration for businesses who are still using Visual Voice Pro 5, Parity CallSuite or CT-ADE computer telephony development environments.
eurovoice objects offers a similar run-time royalty-free licence model to these discontinued products and now supports SIP based VoIP architectures on physical or virtual Servers.
Over the following years eurovoice have helped many businesses port their older applications to eurovoice objects, to benefit from greater choice of supported hardware and freedom from per-port licence fees. At the same time, many customers have taken the opportunity to update applications from VB6 to VB or C#.NET based applications using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 or later.
Decades of experience enables eurovoice to port voice applications to new supported environments quickly and cost-effectively.
Contact us today at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for a quotation to port your application.
CallSuite, Visual Voice, Graphical VOS, VOS, and Topaz are all trademarks. Dialogic is a registered trademark of Dialogic Inc.
