CTI

CTI, what is it? CTI stands for Computer Telephony Integration and it is the uniting of telephones and computers to work together and control each other.

Traditionally telephones and their manufactures have been very proprietary. They all have their own software language, only their software and features work on their systems and only their multi-line phones and hardware work on their own systems.

Computers and their manufactures on the other hand have been very open allowing each others hardware and software to work on everyones' platforms and computers. This has allowed for a very fast evolving and feature rich industry.

CTI through the use of TAPI and TSAPI will bring this freedom of software and feature development to the telephone industry allowing commonly written software by outside people to work on anyone and everyones' telephone system that will support TAPI and TSAPI.

For ease of explanation lets basically say that TAPI and TSAPI are software languages (command sets). The way it works is as follows: Outside software writers write software to run on a PC that will control and do different things to and with the telephone. They write this software in either TAPI or TSAPI. Prior to this all telephone manufactures that wanted to be involved wrote a piece to software to. They each wrote the TAPI and TSAPI drivers for their own telephone system. These drivers work like language interrupters to translate instructions from TAPI or TSAPI into their own respective telephone software language and from their language back into TAPI or TSAPI.

With this in place one programmer could write a feature program to do certain things not knowing anything about the telephone system software language because in reality it's written in a common language and will work on anyones' system that supports CTI.

There are presently many companies out there in the process of writing this software. Most of the programs at this time are basic software that control the phone, i.e. turn on the speaker, transfer a call, put on hold, speed dial from a rolodex program etc. all from the computer screen and the click of a mouse. The possibility for features and this software are unlimited. There are some programs that will automatically pop a screen or pull up records based on who's calling through the use of Caller Id. Many of the programs written today overlap each other and are very expensive. Given time the price of both the hardware to support CTI and the software will come down. Additionally, many of today's companies will go out of business and only the popular software packages will remain