The voice processing equipment market has expanded to include both large and small businesses, and the influence of voice processing—evidenced in voice mail messages and voice response systems—has become widespread. AT&T systems such as the Conversant® Voice Information System and the AUDIX voice messaging system have been designed to enhance both business and personal telecommunications. This paper explores the architectures of AT&T's Conversant and AUDIX systems in terms of hardware, software, and application design.

This paper describes the features and benefits of message networking and the Intuity™ Interchange, a new, intelligent, multiprotocol and multivendor networking server used in multimedia (voice, fax, e‐mail, and/or binary) messaging networks. The Interchange integrates Lucent Technologies' multimedia messaging servers—for example, Intuity/DEFINITY®/R1 AUDIX®, and Overture Aria/Serenade—as well as non‐Lucent messaging systems, into one seamless and expandable messaging network. In addition to supporting Lucent's digital and analog protocols, the Interchange also supports or will support open standard interfaces, such as Audio Message Interface Specification (AMIS) analog, Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM), and Simple Message Transfer Protocol/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (SMTP/MIME), for communication with other vendors' voice‐mail systems (for example, Northern Telecom's Meridian Mail) and e‐mail systems (for example, Microsoft* Exchange*). Because the Interchange is built on an open platform, additional add‐on applications are being rapidly developed to co‐reside on the hub server. One such application is Enterprise Lists, which allows large enterprise‐wide broadcast lists to be defined statically or dynamically. Anyone in the entire network having permission can reach these lists. Application directions include such features as the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), which allows for intelligent enterprise network directory access and builds on the existing centralized directory synchronization already available in the Interchange.