Computer Telephony - CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) - a technology which is carrying out a merger between two independently existing worlds - phone and computer. From such a merger will benefit both of these "classic" technology. First, CTI enables you to use all the advantages of computer ideology (standards, flexibility, compatibility, user-friendly and familiar interface, etc.) to manage telephone connections. A, secondly - this is the provision of a computer terminal to the normal telephone. But perhaps the main advantage of CTI - that of open systems, ie All Computers is based on the standards and, therefore, CTI system easily modified, expanded, the maximum compatibility of the components. These advantages were so obvious that this has led to rapid development and wide application of CTI.
The easiest way to identify the phone as a computer technology to coordinate the actions of the telephone and computer systems. The classical definition: computer telephony - is the industry that specializes in the application of computer intelligence to the implementation and reception of telephone calls, as well as to other complex interactions. The first implementation of a voice connection via computer networks. For computer telephony refers to an interactive voice processing, organization of the voice mail, speech recognition algorithms and Text to Speech.
The basis of computer telephony technology constitute expansion of personal computers. Thus, the typical "system CTI" - is IBM compatible PC, where the special card, which, in turn, connected to telephone lines.
Currently, there are two fundamentally different approaches to the integration of computer and telephone networks.
The first of these involves the transformation of an office worker's desktop stations in some semblance of intelligent telephone. In the workstation installed the necessary computer-telephone charges, which are connected to the telephone network, a computer installed in the required application. Phone can connect to the appropriate jack board, and you can simply abandon it. On the multimedia computer has a microphone and earpiece (recently spread sets telephone headset - with microphone, headphones, plug directly to your computer), but with a set of numbers and the implementation of other functions, interaction with the network card expansion to cope not worse (better) phone apparatus. This approach was proposed by Microsoft and Intel; they suggested application programming interface (API - application programming interface) to create software systems in the framework of this approach. This interface, called TAPI (Telephony Application Programming Interface), provides software applications for operating systems, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows NT.
The second approach, proposed by the companies Novell and AT & T, is to concentrate the entire intelligence system to a dedicated server. This is the server and is "the point of intersection" of computer and computer networks. Special channel it is associated with the office PBX. The user is on the table are a desktop computer and a telephone, each of which is connected to "their" network. All the commands a user working with the application on its network stations are converted to query the server. The server processes it and sends to the PBX, where they are processed in interaction with the phone user. In a server system may be either a special telephone server (for large systems), or a file server on which a special loadable module NetWare (N2M), and equipment that supports the interaction between the server and the PBX. To implement this approach, Novell has also developed an API and called it Telephony Services API (TSAPI)
Each of the API has its own advantages and disadvantages. When working with TAPI do not need to install expensive telephone server and expensive computer-phone application in the client-server architecture, but on each workstation, you need to install computer-telephone equipment. In addition, when using TAPI, all actions relating to the establishment of the connection are performed locally, and computer network organization used only when necessary, for example, refer to the database for information about the caller. Using TSAPI, on the contrary, computer-telephone equipment is only required on the server, but had to buy myself a server and a fairly expensive application. By the same local area network traffic load associated with the establishment of telephone connections, and not all PBX supports the exchange of information to your telephone service. In general, we can say that for the applications to better fit the small-scale architecture of TAPI; but if it is a large annex with a large number of users or the performance of complex switching tasks, it is better to focus on the TSAPI.
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