Abstract: A communication platform for providing computer/telephony integration services to remote subscribers comprises: a hosted call switching unit in communication with an external telephone network or interconnected networks through a communications trunk; for each subscriber, a subscriber telephony component, such as an intelligent agent, executed by processing means belonging to the communication platform and connected to an external subscriber's information system through a permanent private secure data channel, whereby said subscriber telephony component can communicate in a private manner with other information system components of said subscriber so as to be logically part of said information system, each subscriber component being capable of controlling said switching unit according to subscriber data; resources available to each subscriber telephony component in association with call processing or routing; means for allocating resources to each telephone call handled by a subscriber telephony component

Abstract: The present invention relates to a data processing system and method and, more particularly, to a computer aided telephony system and method which uses RTSP and associated protocols to support voice applications and audio processing by various, distributed, speech processing engines. Since RTSP is used to distribute the tasks to be performed by the speech processing engines, a distributed and scalable system can be realised. Furthermore, the integration of third party speech processing engines is greatly simplified due to the RTSP or HTTP interface to those engines.

Abstract: A communication platform for providing computer/telephony integration services to remote subscribers comprises:

Abstract: A fault tolerant platform is provided that comprises two systems running pairs of processes in the active and standby state, one process from each pair running on each system. Each system comprises a fault-tolerance controlling process, first communication channels provided between the fault-tolerance controlling process and the processes in the active or standby state running on its system, and second communication channels provided between the fault-tolerance controlling processes. Management of fault tolerance (that is, promoting a process in a standby state to the active state, and making a process in an active state exit from the active state) is handled by the fault-tolerance controlling processes. A generic management of fault tolerant processes is thus provided in which fault detection and switchover is carried out independently of the applications. The invention thus ensures efficient and coherent switchover between active and standby processes.