(November 11, Bayonne, NJ) The first 1.1 release of GNU Bayonne has been made available for immediate distribution through the GNU Project. This new release is meant to introduce experimental functionality and services that will become a standard part of GNU Bayonne in the future. We have chosen to highlight in this first post 1.0 beta release a complete application script drive office telephony system… that has been developed using GNU Bayonne and the Voicetronix OpenSwitch12 telephony card. This system demonstrates support for common key telephone features such as intercom dialing plans, call coverage, automatic call transfer, and hold/recall. In addition to being freely licensed software, GNU Bayonne telephone systems are implemented in the Bayonne scripting language and can easily be customized, whether to add additional services and features, or to create small office telephone systems highly tailored to meet specific business needs.

In addition to direct support for local telephone systems, we have introduced new support for better integrating GNU Bayonne with existing commercial switching equipment when used as a IVR/voice application services platform. We have introduced experimental support for switch integration modules that can implement native PBX call control and call information protocols. Initially we are providing an experimental SMDI (Simplified Message Desk Interface), which is a Bellcore specified standard integration protocol commonly used in commercial switching equipment today. We will later expand to supporting more advanced native switch control protocols used in common commercial PBX equipment such as available from Harris, Avaya, and Panasonic, where published specifications exist and freely licensed control protocol implementations can be provided.

Other new features to be found in the 1.1 series is experimental support for Intel GlobalCall based telephony cards. This will allow for the creation of very port high density GNU Bayonne solutions, and may be used to enable SS7 and IP voice services with GlobalCall based telephony cards in the future. This new release also offers direct integration of Text-To-Speech synthesis using the freely licensed CMU Flite (Festival Light) TTS system. Many additional features are planned for future 1.1 releases. We also plan to extend the family of available telephony application scripts and services that will be distributed with GNU Bayonne ready for immediate use in the future.

We will concurrently maintain the 1.0 based stable releases of GNU Bayonne as new features are developed for future 1.1 releases. 1.1 releases should be considered experimental and are not recommended for production use at this time. When the 1.1 development tree has proven stable, a new stable 1.2 release of GNU Bayonne will be introduced for production use and the 1.0 releases will be depreciated. Both production and experimental release of GNU Bayonne can be obtained in source code from directly from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/bayonne/. It is included in many popular GNU/Linux distributions, including the Official Debian GNU/Linux system.

 
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