TalkWorks
Encyclopedia
Fax
Fax , sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material , normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device...
-modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
to act as a voice mail program.
Original work was done on the program by AudioFile
AudioFile (company)
AudioFile was a software company that was founded in Massachusetts in 1990. It was founded under Venture Capital Investment by the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation....
, a company that specialized in computer-based voice technology. This firm was bought by Delrina
Delrina
Delrina was a Canadian software company founded by four individuals, Dennis Bennie as CEO and chairman, Mark Skapinker as president, Bert Amato as executive vice president and chief technical officer and Lou Ryan as executive vice president of world wide sales...
in 1994, which then rolled this technology into the initial TalkWorks program. The program was bundled as part of the CommSuite 95
CommSuite 95
CommSuite 95 was a communications software "suite" of products launched by the Canadian software company Delrina in December, 1995. It was a 32-bit based program created specifically for use in Windows 95...
suite of products, and featured a Telephony Application Programming Interface
Telephony Application Programming Interface
The Telephony Application Programming Interface is a Microsoft Windows API, which provides computer telephony integration and enables PCs running Microsoft Windows to use telephone services. Different versions of TAPI are available on different versions of Windows...
that could discriminate whether an incoming call was a fax
Fax
Fax , sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material , normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device...
, data communications, or a regular voice call. TalkWorks would start and digitally record a message when a regular voice call came through.
When Delrina was bought by Symantec
Symantec
Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...
in late 1995, the company acquired this product as well, and continued its development, and its optional add-on voice mail capabilities were first available with WinFax
WinFax
WinFax is a Microsoft Windows-based software product designed to let computers equipped with fax-modems to communicate directly to stand-alone fax machines, or other similarly equipped computers.-History:...
PRO version 7.0. TalkWorks voice mail capabilities were included as a standard feature with the release of WinFax PRO 7.5 (October, 1996) and WinFax PRO 8.0 (March, 1997). Symantec decided that TalkWorks would be sold as a separate product with the release of WinFax PRO 9.0 in 1998. TalkWorks PRO 2.0 was released in August 1998, which was essentially WinFax PRO 9.0 with voice mail capabilities. 1 year later, TalkWorks PRO 3.0 was released and was the last version of TalkWorks PRO developed. Today, current versions of Symantec's WinFax PRO no longer support TalkWorks or include any voice mail capabilities.
External links
- Press Release from October 18, 1994: "Delrina Acquires AudioFile", WaybackMachine archive, accessed November 6, 2005
- Press Release from August 16, 1999: "TalkWorks PRO 3.0 Manages Voice/Fax Communications to Give Small Businesses a More Professional Image"
- Review of Cyberjack browser, accessed November 6, 2005
- TalkWorks PRO/WinFax Support Forums, accessed July 28, 2009