Sunday, March 22, 2009

Towards voice modem and skype integration

I finally made some time to fix up an old pc which has a voice modem installed. I wanted to test the so called skype gateway solutions but without any luck I must say. The closest I got was teleon’s solution (http://www.teleon.net/). Let us suppose we have two skype accounts A and B that both have each other in their contacts. Teleon’s solution promises that if you have Skype opened (with contact A logged in) and you run their server, contact B may sent contact A, an “atd xxxxxxxx” where xxxxxxxx is the desired number to call. Teleon’s server replies to contact B that the request will be handled. After that contact B must make a skype call to contact A. This call is automatically answered by the server while the modem starts (theoretically) dialing the requested phone number and thus contact B can now speak with the requested phone number. In practice, this whole scenario works up to the point the server must dial the phone number. The modem opens the line but never makes the phone call (and I have disabled the wait for dial tone just in case). Any way I lost a couple of hours trying to make it work but I couldn’t and the company seems to be a ghost (since the emails bounce back) so I think I will not be getting any help on that product.

The next thing to do was to start looking for the api to make a phone call via visual basic .net. The dll I was looking for is located in c:\windows\system32\tapi3.dll and although I was hindered by high fever from writing code, I thought I should post the following links just in case someone else wants to play around (and for future reference to myself):
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/devangpro.aspx
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dialerdotnet/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapi3wrapper/
http://tapi4cti.codeplex.com/

I also found the following very interesting library (which also contains a tapi3 wrapper):
http://c4fdevkit.codeplex.com/

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