Aculab is a leading provider of enabling technology for the communications market. We have produced an open standard computer telephony (CT) product portfolio that satisfies the digital signal processor (DSP) resource and global digital connectivity requirements of developers and system integrators.

Learn about Aculab’s product portfolio, which 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 of our software products can function in conjunction with our 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.

Aculab offers one complete CT solution - GroomerII. Find out how this high density routing and switching platform, which includes protocol conversion, can be customised for your application requirements.

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.

DIGITAL NETWORK ACCESS

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.

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.

ACULAB - 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.

PROSODY with 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.

GROUP 3 FAX with capabilitie for Prosody

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.

GROOMER II - Protocol convertion and more

Enabling interoperability in a converging world
Alternative carriers, network operators and service providers. Switching equipment vendors and systems integrators. All need to support protocol conversions and complex call routing applications between a variety of incompatible networks around the world. Aculab’s GroomerII provides the solution.

Because GroomerII is an adaptable, high density routing and switching platform it can be readily customised for a variety of such application requirements.

GroomerII enables interconnection and protocol conversion between most of the world’s ISDN networks, including SS7 (ITU-T ISUP) and a rich legacy of CAS and R2 derivatives.

But GroomerII provides more than just protocol conversion. It presents a powerful and effective means of providing a connection between otherwise incompatible network interfaces.

A powerful and flexible problem solver
GroomerII is typically deployed between private networks, or PBX/ACD switches and public networks with disparate interfaces. Alternatively, it may also be used within a telco network as new mobile switching platforms are added. In addition, GroomerII may be used by an application service provider (ASP) to bypass the congested local access network with direct SS7 connection.

Traditionally service providers have been forced to maintain expensive, bespoke PBX solutions to facilitate international connection. Equally, equipment vendors would be required to invest in new product development to enable inter-working with different networks. Today, GroomerII harnesses the power of computer telephony to provide a single, flexible connection solution. Moreover, it is used to extend the capability of existing infrastructure, reduce cost and generate revenue.

Due to the flexibility of its routing and switching capabilities, GroomerII also provides solutions for a range of diverse applications.

These include:

• Protocol conversion with connectivity to SS7 and most of the world’s ISDN and CAS networks
• Flexible call routing with least cost and alternative routing plus time of day or week scheduling
• External database connectivity via an ODBC interface for number portability and CLI or DDI based routing
• Number translation with identity or number based routing to create dynamic routing systems
• Multi-port concentration where multiple incoming channels can be fed to a consolidated onward route
• Billing features provide call data records (CDR) for network management systems and advice of charge (AOC) generation and mapping to extend the functionality of many PBXs
• Connecting E1 and T1 networks with A-law/µ-law encoding conversion
• Progress tone generation provides call progress tones for non-ISDN signalling
• Configurable alarm and cause mapping from one port to another