FreeSWITCH, an open source telephone soft-switch, reached a new milestone this week by combining three revolutionary VoIP features into one application.


In early April the project first announced interoperability with the GoogleTalk voice chat client making it possible to gateway calls to SIP or the public phone network. Three months later, the software made big news with successful switching of calls at 16 kilohertz. Traditionally, VoIP calls operate at 8 kilohertz (about 1/5 the detail in CD quality).


With this improvement in detail, voices have more richness and clarity improving the overall experience of a phone call. This week the software has brought the first two elements together and topped it off with a new capability that may change the way we interface to our phones.


GoogleTalk has recently released a new version of their client capable of transmitting audio at 16 kilohertz making it possible to call FreeSWITCH and interact in a conference bridge or listen to a text-to-speech engine read you your favorite news story all in high definition audio.


Now for the twist, not only can you interact with the system on the phone by listening to the audio and dialing a few digits, now you can send and receive text messages with the system at the same time.


Imagine being asked out loud for your account information and being asked to type your name into the chat box and actually have the other end of the call able to intercept the information and react accordingly. This may break the paradigm of the auto-attendant altogether.


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