Assisted Telephony

A valuable feature of Win32 Telephony is the small set of functions called Assisted Telephony. Assisted Telephony is designed to make the establishment of voice calls and of media calls available to any Win32-based application, not just those dedicated to telephonic functionality. In other words, Assisted Telephony lets applications make telephone calls without needing to be aware of the details of the services of the full Telephony API. It extends telephony to word-processing applications, spreadsheets, databases, personal information managers, and other non-telephony applications. For example, adding the Assisted Telephony tapiRequestMakeCall function to a spreadsheet lets users automatically dial telephone numbers stored in the spreadsheet (or in a connected database).

The power of Assisted Telephony can be illustrated by the following example. A spreadsheet application can incorporate functions that dial a telephone number for a speech call. As long as the application needs none of the detailed call control provided by the full Telephony API, Assisted Telephony is the easiest and most efficient way to give it telephonic functionality. Functionality beyond dialing such as the transmission and reception of data would require additional data-transfer APIs, including the communications functions of the Comm API.

Because Assisted Telephony and the full Telephony API are used and implemented in different ways, it is not advised to mix Assisted Telephony function calls and Telephony API function calls within a single application.

For more information about the uses and functions of Assisted Telephony, see Assisted Telephony Overview.