CORBA-based multimedia audio chat

This paper presents a chat application that uses CORBA Event and Naming services for communication between users and Microsoft text-to-speech engines to speak the messages. Users can choose the computer voice, which will represent them during the chat, by selecting the gender, speed and pitch of the text-to-speech engine. After connecting to a server, users can create new rooms or browse the existing ones. Before joining a room, a user can retrieve other participants' pictures or samples of their real voices. One important feature is the absence of a dedicated chat server, which has been replaced by the CORBA Event and Naming services. This allows each host, on which the two CORBA services are running, to be used as a chat server. An open message-passing based solution assures synchronization between users, as well as the transmission of chat messages. A new Audio Chat Communication Protocol (ACCP) has been designed for this purpose.