Professional Telephony Devices - which one?

[favour]

Hi,

 

I may be in the wrong place as it does say TAPI compliant Voice Modems but I am hoping someone can help me or point me to a place that can.

 

I am looking at purchasing a device of some sort that will allow me control of our phone calls, in particular being able to set different answering messages depending on the time and forwarding after hours calls to another phone number (amongst one or two other less important things).

 

I have been looking at some boards in particular the CAHTA and CURL series. Which brings me to my questions: In the CAHTA series there are USB and PCI boards. The PCI boards are significantly more expensive. Is this because they are better quality. Does anyone recommend USB devices for this type of function?

 

Also I know of TAPI-compliant devices which the CURL series are. Is this important to me if I am just going to be buying devices from scratch. I assume it is the software that dictates whether your device needs to be TAPI-compliant? Also we may need a device to test our own developed software application, in particular making calls and answering calls. This can be done without TAPI-compliancy?

 

Thank you in advance for your help.

[Guest nchto]

For the software part of what you're trying to do you'll need IVM. Have a look at http://www.nch.com.au/ivm/ for more information about what it can do (which is everything you've described!).

 

For the hardware part, there shouldn't be a difference between the USB and PCI versions other than the obvious usage/functionality. It depends on what applications you would like to use the device for; are you going to move the telephony board from computer to computer or simply have it in your server and forget about it? As for TAPI compliance, are you going to be using it with just our applications or is it possible that you will be using it with other TAPI compliant software? TAPI is simply a set of standard communication protocols for software applications to talk to telephony devices. If you're developing your own software then I suppose it doesn't matter what you use just as long as you're able to find the documentation for communicating with the device.