Hi Roman,

I wrote a Voice Mail and several IVR interfaces into some of my apps back in 1996 - 1998 using Artisoft's Visual Voice ActiveX controls. Everything worked really well with the Visual Voice tools except for one MAJOR FLAW that Artisoft had with their INTERDIGIT TIMEOUT Property. (It didn't work when a Caller pressed a digit while the Voice Prompt was playing. At that point, the Interdigit Timeout never started and the caller would wait for the entire Total Timeout for the Prompt. I spent 17 hours on the phone long distance with Artisoft's tech support explaining to them what the problem was and finally they recognized the problem and admitted the flaw. There was NO workaround. I spent approximately 1000 hours developing a product for a client only to not have it work and have the client pull the plug and never get paid for the project.

Artisoft finally fixed the problem about 8 months later and then wanted to charge me for the upgrade to the fix. Which I eventually got for free (I called the President of Artisoft directly). Artisoft also wrote a letter to my client explaining their problem as I had since the client did not initially accept my explanation. I still didn't get paid for the work though. Artisoft's next release was rewritten using ATL and they didn't properly write it and it would only work with VFP if you passed EVERY parameter to the Methods which meant a rewrite of every piece of code again calling each method passing all "optional" parameters. Artisoft finally got it write with Visual Voice 5.X another year later or so. I then was able to use the product for my own internal use but never used it anywhere else after that. I was using the Dialog D/41D cards back then. I never needed anymore ports than that.

Artisoft no longer sells their software toolkit directly anymore and I haven't looked to see who has the best ActiveX toolset support for Dialogic (which is now owned by Intel I believe).

The only issue with using VFP with Visual Voice was that I had to startup a separate VFP EXE for each Voice Channel since VFP is not multi-threaded. I could have rewritten it in Delphi and started each channel on a separate thread but I was just getting started with Delphi back in 1996 and it wasn't as mature as it is today.


> All is in the title, I've got to develop a CTI server using Dialogic card, any news and experience are welcome...