Last updated March 27, 2001
This FAQ is a work in progress and will continue to be updated as time permits. If you have suggestions for additions to this FAQ please let me know! This FAQ is "unofficial" in that it is solely my own work, with no encouragement, assistance, or recognition from Microsoft or any other company or organization. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc. specifically related to this FAQ please contact me at Please do not e-mail me with your TAPI questions.
This FAQ is a compilation of information from a number of people and places. Much of this information can be found discussed on the newsgroup microsoft.public.win32.programmer.tapi. If you have TAPI questions that are not answered here then I strongly suggest you post your question to this newsgroup. Again, please do not e-mail me with your TAPI questions, but post them to this newsgroup instead. I do not always have the time to respond personally and I also may not be the best person to ask. If you do e-mail me with TAPI questions I may very well suggest that you post your question to the TAPI newsgroup instead. Many TAPI developers, including myself, monitor this newsgroup on a regular basis and answer whatever questions we can.
To briefly introduce myself and my experience with TAPI, starting in 1992 I worked for Stylus Innovation, a company that was devoted to the development of voice & fax telephony tools for Windows. During my years at Stylus I was a developer working on their flagship Visual Voice Pro product line. I was also the principle engineer behind their toolkits Visual Voice for TAPI and Visual Fax. In 1995 Stylus was bought by Artisoft, Inc., and shortly after that I left to persue opportunities first in speech recognition then in a startup internet search company (that is still doing quite well despite all the recent "dot-com" failures). Recently, and I feel unfortunately, Artisoft decided to discontinue the Visual Voice and Visual Fax products. They were sold to Dialogic and Artisoft is now focusing primarially on PC based PBX systems.
During my years at Stylus/Artisoft I spent a great deal of time working with TAPI.. I started working with TAPI in mid 1994 when only a handful of companies were actively developing TAPI software, and spent close to two years focusing primarily on TAPI development. I also attended the first four TAPI Bakeoffs, engineering testing events organized by Microsoft and other telephony vendors, in order to test Visual Voice for TAPI on a wide range of hardware platforms. My knowledge of TAPI focuses primarily on development of voice processing applications and working with voice hardware, as well as some knowledge of datamodem communications, PBX app development, etc.
Some other TAPI FAQ's that are available:
Michael Dunn's TAPI site : http://www.rainyjay.com/tapi/tapi.htm
Grant Schenck Software : http://grantschenck.tripod.com/
Andreas Marschall.s TAPI and TSPI FAQ : http://www.i-b-a-m.de/Andreas_Marschall's_TAPI_and_TSPI_FAQ.htm
If you have questions about TAPI then the best place to ask them is in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer newsgroup.
Without further ado, here's my FAQ:
Whats New - 3/27/01
» New URL: http://tapifaq.pennypacker.org
» Too many other updates to mention here!
I. Introduction
II. Unimodem and Unimodem/V
III. Utilities & source code
IV. TAPI custom controls
V. TAPI books and references
VI. General TAPI application development questions
VII. Voice/audio related development questions
VIII. Service Provider (TSP) development questions