The Digital Voice Exchange
The Wang DVX was one of the first integrated switchboard and voicemail systems. In the United Kingdom it was selected for the DTI Office Automation Pilot schemes at the National Coal Board in about 1980.
Lawrence E. Bergeron was instrumental in managing the Voice Engineering Department at Wang Labs. He promoted the purchase of a VAX-11/780 for 'real-time' signal processing research and created the Peripheral Signal Processor board (PSP). The PSP was placed into 16 racks to handle 128 phone lines for the DVX (Digital Voice Exchange).
Voice prompts were created by a hired voice specialist to give a melodic presentation for the DVX. To avoid false triggering of touch-tones by the prompts (due to input/output cross talk), notch filters were created to remove the touch tone frequencies from the prompts.
Some of the prompt languages supported were: German, Spanish, French, British English, American English, and Portuguese.
Internal research on speech recognition was carried out and implemented for discrete word recognition but was never released to the field.
At one point there were 50 members of the Voice Engineering Department.
Read more about this topic: Wang Laboratories
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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