[Indigo]<Voice>Stewart>audioProposal.memo!1

This memo presents what we think is an appropriate voice game for CSL, discusses a vision of new functionality that might come into our lives as a result of the endeavor, describes the enabling architecture as we see it, and then discusses a plan for setting out.

Why voice? We see two domains. First, in the real-time world, our information management skills can give us improved control over voice communications (taming the telephone). Second, when we can integrate voice with our other endeavors (voice as data), we can add an additional dimension to all those activities. By "voice", we do not mean "audio", as in music, and we do not mean "speech", as in speech synthesis or speech recognition. We do mean the integration of telephone service and the recording and retrieval of stored voice.

We have concluded that the most useful way to add voice into our systems is to start by providing a new and better, Ethernet-based, form of telephone service. It seems likely that we can make genuine improvements in our own lives; and, in the process, we will have to build those fundamental tools for handling voice from which other extensions into the world of audio will grow naturally.

Our eventual goal is to build fully integrated systems that include voice as naturally as our systems now include text. Within about two years, we plan to provide every member of CSL with an Ethernet telephone, or Etherphone.

The Etherphone system would transmit voice and control information over the Ethernet rather than over conventional phone wires. The Etherphones themselves would simply be terminal equipment (ethernet peripherals), without much intelligence of their own. Users’ workstations would be used for enhanced user interfaces. A Voice File Server would be used for storage and retrieval of voice. An Etherphone server would control the collection of Etherphones and generllay manage the system. A gateway function would connect the Etherphone system to the national telephone network.