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Aculab
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Aculab's product portfolio encompasses a complete range of technologies including IP telephony, Text-To-Speech (TTS), Automatic Speech Recogntion (ASR), Speaker Verification and Identification (SVI), conferencing and Group 3 fax. All the software products can function in conjunction with the comprehensive range of digital network access cards and DSP resource cards. This provides developers with the benefits of high density data and speech processing in an extremely compact and flexible form, resulting in a low per-channel cost.
Protocols and approvals
In many countries it is possible to obtain Host Independent type approval, such that the access card may be integrated into PC based solutions without further telecom approvals being required.
In regions where this option is not available, each complete customer solution will need to be submitted for approval, and Aculab has experience in supporting integrators in gaining such system level type approvals.
A summary table of the approvals and protocol information can be viewed as a PDF file by clicking on the adjacent logo (163kB). Please note that a number of protocols are used throughout the world, (like DPNSS, QSIG and SS7) and are indexed as "Worldwide" in the tables.
Products list:
- Digital Network Access Cards
- IP Telephony Cards
- Prosody DSP Resources
- Prosody S Media Processing Software
- Prosody X Media Processing Card
- TTS (Text To Speech)
- ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition)
- Group 3 FAX
Digital Network Access Cards Aculab's digital network access portfolio is available to developers who require connection of computer telephony (CT) solutions to public or private networks.
Aculab's high performance, standards compliant range offers all of the essential features, including reliability and scalability, for both enterprise and telco grade products.
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IP Telephony Cards For computer telephony developers and systems integrators who are seeking to implement conversation quality speech over IP networks, Aculab offer an IP telephony card in either PCI or cPCI form factor. These standards based cards offer up to 120 channels with low latency, using H.323 or SIP, in a single card slot.
Ease of use. Aculab's IP telephony cards come with a single API, which is just a small extension to the generic API that existing customers will be familiar with. The same API library is used for all digital network access cards, making porting and compiling of applications easy for customers. For a new user all that is required is to master a couple of API commands or function calls - it's that simple. Uniquely, the API provides easy control of the protocol stack, RTP packet handling and voice compression, from within a single interface. For new and active developers alike this makes it easy to leverage IP telephony through existing applications, which can be ported from current platforms with minimal time and effort.
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Prosody DSP Resources Prosody is Aculab's DSP resource platform, which provides developers with adaptable, high-density speech and data processing capabilities. A single Prosody card, occupying a single slot, can deliver 256 channels of DSP processing and is available in PCI and CompactPCI (cPCI) card formats.
More than speech processing
Because high performance DSPs are used, Prosody provides both high channel density and a low per-channel cost.
In addition to algorithms that are expected as standard in a speech processing product (record, playback, conferencing, tone detection and generation, etc.), Prosody also supports a broader set of higher-level technologies including automatic speech recognition (ASR), fax, text-to-speech (TTS) and speaker verification and identification (SVI). All functionality is accessed via a single generic API and can be run on a single card, allowing the development of more versatile and cost effective solutions.
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Prosody S Media Processing Software Prosody S is a software only product providing core speech processing resources that run on a host PC's CPU - eliminating the need for a dedicated digital signal processing (DSP) resource card. Prosody S operates in a voice over IP environment and is accessed via Aculab's generic API.
Configuration example
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Prosody X Media Processing Card Prosody X is a genuine breakthrough in card design that acknowledges the reality of IP in today's telco network infrastructures.
It is a card designed for media processing in IP-based networks with TDM connectivity as an option. Designed around an IP core, its architecture makes the product distributable amongst different chassis platforms offering resilience and scalability as well as helping future proof solutions as they move to IP.
Unrivalled benchmarks in density and price will provide you with a competitive advantage in this new era in communications.
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TTS (Text To Speech)
Aculab TTS v.3 brings major enhancements. This release includes support for the W3C standard speech synthesis mark-up language (SSML), full release of Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, a Spanish female voice, improvements to pronunciation and prosody for all languages, and a talking dictionary creation tool. Aculab's host based TTS is a fully scalable, fast and accurate concatenative speech synthesis system that has a small memory footprint and offers an exceptionally high channel count using a client/server architecture.Aculab TTS works in conjunction with Prosody DSP resource cards, which are used for audio replay and the simultaneous use of other DSP speech resources.
Developers are thus able to enhance the performance of their telephony applications, combining TTS with automatic speech recognition and separate speech processing algorithms through the generic Aculab API. When used with Prosody DSP resources, Aculab TTS is available under a cost free license from software downloads.
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ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) Computer telephony developers who are seeking to incorporate ASR and bring interactive dialogue applications to market, have an ideal solution in Aculab's phoneme based speech recogniser. It recognises naturally spoken words or phrases from a number of alternatives specified in a recognition grammar. Aculab's host based ASR software offers developers excellent value through a cost free licence.
The use of phonetic models allows customers to define and extend the recogniser's vocabulary, simply by adding entries from a pronunciation dictionary.
Scalable systems can be readily achieved with one or more ASR servers receiving recogniser channel feeds from one or more client systems. Only the client systems require Prosody DSP resource cards. In addition, ASR may be combined with other Prosody card algorithms to bring increased flexibility and choice to integrators. This confirms Aculab's commitment to offering unmatched value and to continually extend the features available to applications using Prosody. These features are incorporated within Aculab's generic API and together with the wide ranging country type approval and protocol support available from Aculab, will reduce time to market.
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Group 3 FAX Group 3 fax allows the transmission and reception of faxes within T.30 specifications as detailed below. A system can discriminate between fax or voice calls allowing an application to route the call to either fax or speech resources. With Prosody DSP resources software available to download from Aculab's web site at no extra cost, this solution brings unmatched value per channel.
Applications
As the use of fax has proliferated, the demand for open standards computer telephony based solutions has grown and the use of proprietary hardware solutions is no longer a fixed expectation. Services like fax-on-demand and fax broadcast have become basic business tools for many organisations in different customer facing and business-to-business industry sectors.
This creates many market opportunities for developers and integrators. With the flexibility of a fax option on intelligent DSP resource cards like Prosody, dedicated fax cards become a thing of the past, especially when the benefit of learning and developing with a single generic API is considered.
Architecture
Prosody DSP resource cards are available in PCI and CompactPCI formats. The algorithms supporting the fax protocols are selected by the developer (see software downloads) and loaded onto each DSP as required. Up to 4 DSPs are available on a single card, benefiting the developer with a wide choice of functional permutations for building real time CT solutions.
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