It provides the basis for applications such as voice mail, annotation of multimedia documents, and voice editing using standard text-editing techniques. To facilitate sharing, the voice manager stores voice on a special voice file server that is accessible via the local internet. Operations for editing a passage of recorded voice simply build persistent data structures to represent the edited voice. These data structures, implementing an abstraction called voice ropes , are stored in a server database and consist of lists of intervals within voice files.
Clients refer to voice ropes solely by reference.
More importantly, they provide a reliable reference-counting mechanism, permitting the garbage collection of voice ropes that are no longer needed. 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. The voice manager is functionally equivalent to a file or database management system. The authors go on to describe experiences with and evaluations of the usage of the Etherphone system.