Toronto Asterisk User Group

Richard is the founder and President of Positron Telecom, which produces innovative VoIP equipment for Telephony applications. He was previously a Sales Engineer, Territory Sales Manager and Product Manager at Eicon Networks and later Dialogic Corporation. From there he went on to start his own Linux consulting firm, which developed solutions based on OpenWrt and Asterisk projects, and created a line of embedded appliances at his company Bulletendpoints.

Presenter:

Mark Chignell, CEO of Vocalage Inc. and the Director of the University of Toronto Interactive Media Lab.

Synopsis:

The functions of the telephone are largely driven by the requirements of nineteenth century technology. The telephone uses mono audio, as do modern speakerphones. Aside from echo cancellation and improved sound codecs, speaker phones have not been customized to facilitate voice conferencing.

In this talk the use of spatialized audio to enhance voice conferencing in the Vocal Village system will be briefly introduced. We will then describe a ten-key pad voice conference controller that was developed with Oki Electric Corporation to meet the needs of Japanese teleworkers with physical disabilities when they collaborated on web design projects. That will be followed by a discussion of our work in developing a new generation VoIP speaker phone for business conference rooms. We will discuss prototypes built using Vaio and Nortech tablets and using a Breadboard computer.

The talk will include a discussion of some of the challenges faced in developing this kind of hardware solution and the relative advantages of different platforms for VoIP speakerphone development.