AN AUDIO AND TELEPHONE SERVER FOR MULTI-MEDIA WORKSTATIONS

Workstation utility may be enhanced by the addition of audio and telephony functions for a number of applications, such as voice mail, multi-media documents, and computer conferencing. We outline the requirements of these appli-cations, and present an audio server architecture employ-ing a personal computer with a disk and speech-processing board as a server dedicated to the workstation. The func-tional interface between client and server is described, as well as our motivation for this specific server approach with particular emphasis on user interface considerations. We discuss our experience with this server architecture and contrast it with alternate architectures.