According to the authors’ abstract, “the voice manager in the Etherphone system provides facilities for recording, editing, and playing stored voice in a distributed personal-computing environment. It provides the basis for applications such as voice mail, annotation of multimedia documents, and voice editing using standard text-editing techniques . . . .” In this paper, the authors describe the architecture of the Etherphone system and its applications. They also describe the operational aspects and detail the design of several key components of the Etherphone system: voice manager, voice file server, and voice rope. The voice manager is functionally equivalent to a file or database management system. Voice rope is an abstraction of voice string/sequence. The authors go on to describe experiences with and evaluations of the usage of the Etherphone system.

The paper is well written and easy to read. It provides an operational overview of the system in addition to a detailed description of its design, making it useful for system architects, engineers, and designers as well as programmers. It is recommended reading for those interested in multimedia integration.