We've been waiting a long time, and it's finally here. Rich Helmke at Keware has been hard at work for quite some time to bring phone control to HomeSeer.

Well it's not really here. The first widely available beta is though. And with a company like Keware this is a good thing. Your input is heard and listened to, which is why HomeSeer is so robust and in tune with users. I've got a first look at the current version, subject to change on all fronts. In fact the screen shots are a bit off because this was written ahead of the first beta. I'll update asap.

As Rich worked he discovered the joys of TAPI (Microsoft's Telephone Application Programming Interface), and modem quirks. While TAPI is meant to ease programming voice modem features, in practice it's not easy to nail down.

One big goal was controlling HomeSeer from any phone in the house. While this is done with products like HAL, they use one model of a creative modem capable of controlling the handset (external phones). But even that approach doesn't work so well. My personal test with that modem and handset mode resulted in quite a noisy connection.

So instead of HomeSeer Phone being just software, it's also optionally a hardware component.

The Black Box-->