Computer Consoles Inc.

Computer Consoles Inc. or CCI was a telephony and computer company located in Rochester, New York, United States, which did business first as a private, and then ultimately a public company from 1968 to 1990. CCI provided worldwide telephone companies with Directory Assistance (DA) equipment and other systems to automate various operator and telephony services, and later sold a line of 68k-based Unix computers and the Power 6/32 Unix supermini.

Computer Consoles Inc. (CCI, incorporated May 20, 1968) was founded by three Xerox employees, Edward H. Nutter, Alfred J. Moretti, and Jeffrey Tai, to develop one of the earliest versions of a smart computer terminal, principally for the telephony market. Due to the state of the art in electronics at the time, this smart terminal was the size of an average sized office desk.

Due to the success of the smart computer terminal, and the expertise the company gained in understanding Operator Services, the company started development programs to offer networked computer systems that provided contract managed access time, specified as a guaranteed number of seconds to paint the operator's first screen of information, to various telephony databases such as Directory Assistance and Intercept. The largest such system was designed and installed for British Telecom to provide initially Directory Assistance throughout Great Britain and Ireland. These systems combined Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 computers with custom hardware and software developed by CCI.

To provide higher levels of automation to operator services, CCI introduced in the early 1980s various Automatic Voice Response (AVR) systems tightly integrated with its popular Directory Assistance systems. AVR provided voice response of the customer requested data, almost universally starting the prompt with a variant of the phrase, "The number is". Early systems were based on very small vocabulary synthesised speech chips, follow-on systems utilized 8-bit PCM, and later ADPCM voice playback using audio authored either by CCI or the local phone company.

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