RE: ACS for Linux

["David Sugar" <dyfet tycho com>]

> Hello, I am a huge Linux advocate and had an idea that
> could help the Blinux project significantly, and rather
> than hold on to it until I could personally do something
> about it, I wanted to at least let someone else get started
> on it if they saw the same kind of possibility that I saw.
>
> I couldn't find the address of someone more appropriate
> to send this to, so I apologize if this letter should really
> go to someone else.
>
> It seemed to me that people who would like to access their
> computers using only a phone as the terminal are the functional
> equivalent to a blind person (except for the braille stuff).
>
> Anyway, the reason that's significant is that their is
> a lot of funding for software that helps out road warriors.
>
> BLinux could get a major funding boost, address
> increasing blind awareness, and solve many corporate
> communication problems, if it started targeting some
> of its efforts in the the digital assistant world, thinking
> that all the end user has is a cel phone in thier hands.
>
> If BLinux worked with the guys doing the ACS (Adjunct
> Communication Server) project you could probably have
> a commercialable product based on service fees which
> would allow more funding of Blinux projects.
>
> Anyway, I didn't want to sit on the idea although I can
> do nothing about it right now I wanted to at least get the
> word out, in case someone else could.
>
> -- Michael --
>
As the author of ACS, I would like to make it clear that ACS is a GPL
licnesed project.  The ACS project itself is open to outside contributors,
and one is also free to adapt ACS in any fashion desired.

Also, I found an interesting and very true point made earlier that there is
more interest and activity at the moment commercially for projects involving
telephone based "audio user interfaces" (AUI, if you will) than voice
enabled PC's.  Many of same issues do come up in both environments.  I
suppose one could take the analogy far enough to conclude a PC server with a
multi-line telephony card could be conceptually treated as a
multi-terminal/multi-user "AUI" system.

The goal for ACS in the AUI area is to take advantage of both TTS and speech
recognition support that is DSP hosted on many telephony boards to provide
an interactive voice and DTMF controlled user interface under script
control.  Now such an interface can obviously be used for browsing voice
mail messages and direct incoming callers.  But it need not be limited to
such specific tasks and goals...

A related issue is the lack of TDD support in many telephony projects.  The
amount of effort and DSP resource required on a modern telephony card to
handle the simple FSK encoding used in TDD devices is trivial, and all these
boards already come with FSK firmware routines anyway.  Being able to detect
and support TDD callers is also a goal for ACS.