Kiax started in early 2004 as a small program mainly aimed to provide a simple user interface for making VoIP calls with Asterisk PBX (an open source VoIP PBX). Its first versions showed the existing need for a user-friendly, free and open softphone. Currently Kiax has been downloaded by more than 60 000 users (stats from SourceForge.net) and is available for direct installation from the repositories of the major Linux distros (Ubuntu, SuSE). While it is functionally rich and considerably stable its development has reached a state where modification and customization became difficult. With the help of Forschung-Direkt and MIXvoip Kiax development has been restarted. Kiax ver.2 is a complete re-write of the softphone which aims to clean up the design issues and to provide a more flexible architecture for extention and customization.

Features and characteristics

* LGPL-licensed core, GPL GUI
* Decoupled Signaling, Storage and Visualization aspects
* Modularized, lightweight core layer
* GCC4 ready code
* Single codebase for Linux, Windows and MacOS
* SQLite as default storage backend
* QT4.4 as GUI frontend
* Webkit integration
* Even simpler (than old Kiax) to use UI
* Completely brandable
* Remote configuration
* Simplified integration with service providers (via JSON)
* Support for multiple service providers
* Support for simultaneous calls
* Registry fail-over support
* Live CDR and Contacts search
* Codecs: G711, iLBC, GSM, Speex
* Noise reduction filter
* I18n support