The speech processing market continued its wander towards the commodity end of the industry last week when the Delrina Technology Inc subsidiary of Delrina Corp, Toronto said that it would be adding speech extensions to its WinFax personal computer facsimile software. Delrina says it will exploit the signal processing capabilities that some facsimile modem manufactures are just beginning to build into their products. Last June both Zilog Corp and National Semiconductor Corp announced chip sets that combined voice, modem and facsimile capabilities and already a number of board-level products are coming to market that incorporate them. Delrina is basing its pitch on the expected low cost of these modems relative to the cost of buying separate facsimile and answering machines, and the large installed base of Windows users with a single phone line who keep finding themselves talking to modems. The intended extensions sound quite powerful. Delrina says that it will support call discrimination, integrated voice mail, Caller ID, an audio notepad, automated dialling, and the standard Windows list is the basic requirement to distinguish between incoming speech, facsimile and modem calls. Delrina claims, without explaining how, that the close integration of software and hardware will mean that the detection will be more reliable than existing switches, which occasionally make mistakes. The integrated voicemail facility is designed to provide facilities akin to the familiar answering machine. All messages are saved to the computer.
Remotely
If the incoming call is a facsimile message, WinFax will automatically switch on to receive it. In addition, users can access their voice mail remotely. By dialling-in and pushing a series of touch-tone codes, they can play-back, save and delete messages, and change the system’s announcements and their personal greeting. Where available, Delrina says the software will be able to take advantage of calling line identification so users can screen their calls. Finally Audio notepad will enable the user to recording their phone conversation at the click of a button. Delrina says that OEM and retail versions of WinFax with voice will begin to appear early this summer as the hardware products begin to roll out.
