Vox Studio is a software tool for telecom professionals. Its purpose is to create speech files for computer-telephony and voice processing applications such as voicemail, interactive voice response, call centers, phone banking, audiotex, telephony portals, voice gateways and the like. Vox Studio speeds up the time-consuming tasks involved in the production of voice files and produces high-quality telephony files. Such files are often classified as "vox" files, hence the name Vox Studio.
With Vox Studio, these voice files (called "prompts" in the industry) can be created on-site using a PC, a multimedia sound card, a decent-quality microphone, and a reasonably-silent recording room.
Vox Studio starts by recording standard Windows ".wav" files. If required, these can be edited in Vox Studio and then converted into telephony files encoded in various flavors of ADPCM, A-law PCM, Mu-law PCM, linear PCM and other formats. In fact, you can convert a message from any supported format to any other supported format. Vox Studio does support a very large portfolio of manufacturer-specific file formats. It can also convert sound files prepared on a Mac into telephony files. This makes the product useful both for telephony system administrators or integrators and for recording studios. The Vox Studio conversion quality is superb and this is one of the reasons why this product has become an industry standard.
Massive prompt-recording sessions (up to thousands of prompts) are facilitated by the "teleprompter", by the "tape loader" and by the "file slicer" functions built into Vox Studio. The prompter flashes texts one by one on the PC's screen while they are read by the voice-talent (the speaker). It is a very easy and productive way of recording a large number of prompts in one session. The tape loader automatically digitizes, cuts and saves a prerecorded studio tape, without operator intervention. The file slicer does the same thing by cutting a large pre-existing ".wav" file into voice "slices". Professional studio recordings can be chopped in pieces very rapidly and saved as separate digital voice files.
Another, highly time-consuming task, automated by Vox Studio, is the cleaning-up (or trimming) of recorded prompts. Vox Studio can add or remove silence at the beginning and at the end of voice files. Vox Studio does this automatically for you and intelligently adjusts the length of silence to your system requirements.
There are a lots of other features built right into Vox Studio, like the reduction of talk-off through DTMF detection and DTMF filtering, automatic power level normalization of all files for maximum intelligibility, and more. Voice processing professionals love to have these capabilities grouped into one easy-to-use and very efficient tool.
Vox Studio 3 is a user-friendly 32-bit Windows application. It is compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT4 and Windows 2000. A sound card is required if files are to be recorded or played. No sound card is necessary if Vox Studio is exclusively used to convert one file format to another or to do filtering or trimming operations.
Vox Studio is targeted at telephony application developers and their customers. It is also very useful for voice system administrators who need to do regular voice file maintenance. The conversion functions in Vox Studio enable professional recording studios to deliver voice files to their telephony customers even if they know little about the specifics of telephony.
Vox Studio is normally used through a friendly graphical user interface (GUI) but it also offers both a command-line conversion and a DLL conversion capability. This allows programmers to use the Vox Studio sound file conversion features from within their own applications. Command-line and DLL reference information is supplied as a separate file, optionally copied to your hard disk when Vox Studio installs.
The best way to find out about Vox Studio is to read the manual, browse through the help file (voxtudio.chm) then switch on your Multimedia PC and start playing with Vox Studio itself.