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IVR app on a Mac with the TFLX GUI Picture Programming Language. You can even record your sound files and save them in PC voice card -compatible file formats on the Mac.

You then generate a runtime version (a "script") and transfer it and any voice files to an MS-DOS computer using something like Apple's PC Exchange. The runtime controls the DAX software on the PC, which can handle from 4 to 128 phone lines, depending upon its configuration (the minimum configuration is a 33MHz 386DX with voice cards or voice/fax card).

The Mac can be used for something else until you want to make revisions or additions to the program.
Of course, if you only have a Mac and don't need more than a single line, you can purchase TFLX separately (packages complete with cards range from $495 up to $1,750). But if you want to develop PC apps too, you're going to have to buy a PC and a Mac.

TFLX for Macs and DAX for DOS PCs.

Back in the Dark Ages of Mac computing (the mid 1980s) there came the first GUI IVR app generator, Teleflex. Teleflex was a winner in the first annual 1988/89 Media Dimensions Awards for Most Innovative: Voice Applications. The name was shortened to TFLX the following year.

Even in 1988, the program had startling similarities to the most advanced app generators of today, giving users the ability to create incoming or outgoing voice or touch tone apps such as voice messaging, voice processing, IVR, text-to-speech and audio text. The user could record his or her own messages or use the digitized supply provided. Apps were and still are programmed with Magnum's proprietary" Picture Programming Language(tm) which involves linking Task Icons in a flowchart, a process similar to other, later app generators.

The problem with this scenario was that the Mac was limited to a single line. Ultimately, RAM Research (Concord, CA - 510 603-1122) came to the rescue with the PC DAX voice processing software that runs on every multi-line PC hardware platform.

Using Duet now goes like this: You create your voice mail, order entry, fax on demand or

Déjà vu? Duet, like other GUI IVR app generators, lets you construct an app by dragging icons around and connecting them in a flowchart. However, Duet’s proprietary “Picture Programming Language” – also used in the Mac-only version – is actually the Granddaddy of the icon-flowchart paradigm, and was used in the product’s 1988 ancestor; Teleflex.

Magnum Software’s Duet is the only example of a software package that actually requires you to do cross-platform development – you develop your IVR application on a Mac, then create a runtime script for an MS_DOS PC. The single-line Mac only version called TFLX.

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