Asynchronous audio conferencing on the Web

In this paper we discuss the Web as a medium for hosting asynchronous conferences that allow participants to leave voice messages in addition to text. After discussing the advantages of adding audio to the asynchronous conferencing setting, we describe a prototype system that we implemented, which relies on a combination of new Web technologies, including ActiveX, Java and dynamic HTML. We made special efforts to keep our implementation free of any special software installation, and thus allow participants to begin participating in the conference immediately upon arrival to the conference site. While the current state of Web infrastructure supports the submission of text data from client to server, by the HTML FORM element or through a Java applet, there does not yet exist an analogous method for capturing audio data at the client and deliver it to the server. Our solution relies on an ActiveX control to provide this missing functionality, which limits the system's accessibility to users of Internet Explorer under Windows. We describe two proposed technologies that would provide developers with a platform independent means of capturing audio data and submitting it to a server.