Listing of August 1996 Reviews
by James E. Powell
Well-suited to industrial-strength environments, Visual Voice
has a set of 32-bit OLE controls for Visual Basic, C++, Access,
PowerBuilder or Delphi. It offers a slick test mode to simulate
your application using a sound card instead of a telephony board
or voice-enabled modem.
You can record your own voice files and combine them with the
package's prerecorded phrases for date, time, numbers and so on,
to form complete sentences. You also define voice queries, including
the voice prompt itself and the type of response to expect. Assemble
queries in subroutine templates that create a sequence of events-for
example, greet caller, play prompt, get order number, play back
response.
Visual Voice code is easy to understand. After placing the Voice
control on your form (named Voice1, for example), you can add
code to a RingDetected event as simply as: Voice1.Pickup (to answer
the phone), Voice1.PlayMoney 100.00 (to play back "one hundred
dollars and zero cents") and Voice1. Hangup (to hang up).
You can perform a "wink," which takes your phone off
the hook briefly to capture Caller ID data.
The documentation includes plenty of sample code. Visual Voice
doesn't offer the point-and-click simplicity of voysAccess for
Visual Basic, but you can still build a telephony application
quickly with this product.
-- Info File --
Visual Voice Pro 3.0
Price: Windows 95 version, $495; NT version, $795
Pros: Documentation; features
Cons: Not for RAD
Platforms: Windows 95, NT
Disk Space: 20MB+
RAM: 16MB
The Stylus Product Group, Artisoft
617-621-9545, fax 617-621-7862
WinMag Box Score 3.5