Digium, the Asterisk Company, released the TCE400B PCI Express card for use with voice applications based on the open source Asterisk telephony platform.

The new card provides hardware-based voice compression and decompression (codec) capabilities to shift transcoding from software to hardware. Using the TCE400B in place of a software-only solution places fewer demands on servers and frees up

Asterisk to more efficiently process calls and to provide functionality for phone systems such as call recording, conference calling, and interactive voice response (IVR).

Asterisk is the most widely used open source telephony engine and tool kit. By offering flexibility to access and alter the software code, Asterisk empowers developers and systems integrators to create Voice over IP (VoIP) communication solutions that match the specific needs of a business.

“The TCE400B will be of interest to companies using Asterisk to build feature servers, gateways or custom systems and wanting to conserve CPU cycles,” said Bill Miller, Digium’s vice president of product management. “The card’s ability to work with compressed audio in multiple formats also supports its use in complex telephony environments. Overall, the TCE400B will help bring Asterisk into more enterprise telephony environments."