VocalTec

History

VocalTec was founded in 1985 by Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty while still serving together in the IDF, and was officially incorporated in 1989. Its initial operations were devoted to research, development and commercialization of products which provided audio and voice capabilities to personal computers and over computer networks. Cohen and Haramaty developed and manufactured a PC sound card (SpeechBoard TM) that was sold mainly to the local market for various uses such as educational, advertising, radio broadcasting and to the visually-impaired community in Israel with a unique Text to Speech software enabling blind people to use a computer in Hebrew as well as English. As Text to Speech was not available in Hebrew at all, and rarely available in English, they developed both from scratch, utilizing Haramaty's voice, and a user-update-able dictionary of words that was periodically merged between all users.

Other projects during the mid to late 80s included Audio editing software, external audio card (mainly for laptops) that was connected the parallel (printer) port, standalone digital audio playback device for frozen dessert trucks, multimedia presentation with audio (based on IBM's Story Board presentation software), a system for the disabled (mute) with text to speech which enabled "talking" and conducting phone calls, broadcasting recording, editing and transfer system for offshore radio station, automated IVR information systems, voice messaging over LAN and many other projects utilizing digital audio.

In 1990, technology entrepreneur Elon Ganor joined the company to manage International Sales & Marketing, and later on was nominated as CEO.

In 1993, VocalTec introduced The CAT to the international market, a peripheral device that provided audio capability for personal computers. In 1993 and 1994, the company introduced additional products, including CATBoard, a full duplex audio card, an internal audio card that provided high level compression. Net sales of these products totaled approximately $0.3 million, $0.4 Million and $0.2 Million in 1993, 1994 and the first nine months of 1995, respectively, and the Company did not expect to recognize significant revenues from sales of these products in the future.

In early 1993 the company partnered with ClassX, a group of innovative teenagers led by Ofer Shem-Tov (a childhood friend of Haramaty) to develop MS Windows audio drivers and related software. ClassX was acquired by VocalTec in 1993 and became the core of VocalTec's software and network development team, and the company recruited Rami Amit as a hardware engineer (also a childhood friend of Haramaty and Shem-Tov).