Unified communications
Recently we have been deploying shiny new Lync phones at work. These phones mix in with the Lync software client on our staff PCs and in some cases the phones don’t even have dial pads!
The Lync phones we are going to be using are-
- Polycom CX200 (desk tied staff)
- Polycom CX700 (reception)
- HP 4110 (common areas)
- HP 4120 (feature phone for desk tied staff)
The full gallery is over the page 🙂 Continue reading
When setting up a Lync 2010 proof of concept today I was having issues with getting incoming calls to work. I could get outbound calls (to the PSTN) to work as well as hear audio both ways however under no situation would a call come in (from the PSTN) and ring the Polycom CX700 on my desk.
There had to be something network related going on so I turned to trusty Wireshark (link) and made an inbound call (the results of which are shown below).
After much digging around it turns out that our SIP provider had never seen Lync 2010 before and were sending us SIP INVITE using UDP packets, however Lync 2010 only likes TLS and TCP for SIP communications as such each of these packets that were arriving were just getting dropped (indeed if you turn off the Windows firewall you will see replies going back to your SIP provider saying that the port is unreachable).
So one quick phone call to our SIP provider and boom we are now getting our SIP INVITE coming over TCP instead – would you believe it we can now call outbound and inbound.
By far Lync 2010 has to be the most powerful phone/UC system I have ever seen (being super low cost for Schools helps as well) – within minutes of getting inbound calls setup I was able to dial in, redirect a phone call to another number inside the site which then auto forwarded the call onto a mobile number.
I’d also like to thank the guys at our Local Education Authority (LEA) for persevering with me for the past few days trying to get the firewall rules right to get this setup!
Voice recognition is already here so why am I making so much of a fuss about it? Well at least for now we are still very limited as to how we can use voice technology with our phones – most of the time we are limited to issuing simple commands to open applications or run searches. Even Apples Siri technology is limited to a few commands leaving us a long way away from truly ‘talking to our phones’.
So lets take a look at what the Vision 2011 video has in store for us…
Transcribe
Transcribing text is probably the most familiar form of voice recognition at this moment where you say some words or a full sentence and your phone/PC translates that into text. For the time being in phones this is done with the help of a ‘cloud web service’ whereby your words are recorded and transmitted to a server for final translation into text. Continue reading
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