VOIP Today magazine (www.voiptoday.org) is privileged to conduct exclusive interview with Interface Alternative (iFace.com) co-founder  and enterprise marketing manager for Dialogic corporation Jeff Dworkin.

Jeff Dworkin is a recognized pioneer in the Voice Processing and Internet Telephony industries. He co-founded Interface Alternative (later renamed iFace.com) in 1992 and implemented some of the first commercial grade IVR systems that included Speech Recognition, Speaker Verification and Text-To-Speech systems for use in the banking, transportation, retail, health care services, and entertainment industries. 

Jeff is a frequent industry speaker on behalf of Dialogic, and regularly discusses topics including open source telecommunications, telephony application development, video enabled interface design, multimedia enhancements for the next-generation call center

VOIP Today magazine spoke with Jeff Dworkin about Business , technology and products .

voiptoday.org: What is Project DiaStar?

DiaStar is an open source project sponsored by Dialogic Corporation, providing access to Dialogic’s enhanced media and signaling functionality from existing open source platforms such as Asterisk via the Woomera protocol.

voiptoday.org: What are the Benefits of DiaStar?

Creates the bridge between open source projects like Asterisk and Dialogic’s proven media and signaling products.

The DiaStar server can be collocated on the same server as Asterisk or on its own server. Its architecture allows one to many and many to many Asterisk to DiaStar configurations for load balancing and scalability.

Allows Asterisk developers to continue to work in their native development environment and still benefit from products and technologies from Dialogic.

Backed up by Dialogic’s world wide support operation.

voiptoday.org: What are the benefits provided by Dialogic products and Technology?

Call progress detection including Answering Machine Detection, Positive Voice Detection

User definable tone detection
Video, Video Transcoding, Video Transrating, Video Scaling and Video conferencing
SIGTRAN/SS7 signaling
Media offload from the Asterisk. If both call legs terminate on a DiaStar server then the media processing is handled solely by DiaStar, reducing load on the Asterisk Server.

voiptoday.org: How much does it cost?

The DiaStar software is available for download from the www.projectdiastar.org website. 

It is provided as a CD appliance allowing for ease of installation and access.

There is no license fee when DiaStar is used in conjunction with Dialogic DNI cards to enable ISDN connectivity.

There are license fees associated with other advanced technologies.  These fees are currently being finalized and we will be announcing these at time of release (exp March 10, 2010)

* SIP Video
* SS7, SIGTRAN

Trial licenses for this functionality are available free of change on request by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

voiptoday.org: Why DiaStar?

DiaStar provides features and functionality either not available, or not easily accessible on existing open source telephony platforms.

DiaStar provides features and functionality that is superior to what is available native to many open source telephony platforms.

CPA is a good example of this.  Native version 75%-80% accurate.  Perfect call 90%-95% accurate

Video and Signaling        

SIP Video, Video Transcoding, Video transrating, Video scaling and Video Conferencing

SS7 signaling
SIGTRAN
Tone detection

Redundancy, scalability and reliability are side benefits but there are other ways to get there as well.

voiptoday.org: What is next for DiaStar?

Roadmap and Feature subject to market dictated changes, however, possible additions are:
3G-324M — Adds AMR-NB, H.263, and MPEG-4 codec support for video-enabled mobile applications
Fax (V.17) and FoIP (T.38) support — Permits fax-capable applications in both TDM and IP environments
G.726, G.729 — Enables flexible endpoint support
G.726 Narrow band variable rate audio codec (16, 24, 32 and 40kb)
G.729 Narrow band variable rate audio codec
HD Voice - provides significantly superior natural sound and a dramatically increased sense of participating in live conversations and video conferences.
G.722 Wide band variable rate audio codec (48, 56 and 64kb)
AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate)Wide band codec G722.2?
Video Conferencing

voiptoday.org: Why is Dialogic doing open source?

Dialogic realizes that certain segments of communications market are best served by the open source model.  As part of the market, we needed to find a way to best deliver the “stuff” that we are good at to this market.

voiptoday.org: Is DiaStar just a bridge to closed source Dialogic proprietary code?

No, while it is the case that our initial offerings use Dialogic proprietary code to provide us with the quickest way of delivering value added media and signaling services to Asterisk. It is very much our intention that the open source content and value will develop over time with the participation of the community we will be building around DiaStar.

We also actively contributing code to the Asterisk Woomera channel driver (chan_woomera) and also intend to develop other open source Woomera client modules for FreeSWITCH and other popular projects as required by the community.

voiptoday.org: Why Woomera?

The protocol already existed and was conceived by Craig Southeren of Postincrement.

A simple protocol ideally suited to LAN based deployments making the development of Woomera client’s straight forward.

Provides the ability to separate out media processing from the system implementing a Woomera client. Also allows hardware resources to be shared between application servers.

Can scale solution to many to many Asterisk and DiaStar servers for load balancing and failover and scaling.

voiptoday.org: Does DiaStar require any Dialogic Hardware?

Only when you want to implement TDM Gateway functions.  You will need a 1,2,4 or 8 span DNI Board (any combination up to 24 spans) to implement as a TDM Gateways