VocalTec was founded in 1985 by Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty while still serving together in the IDF, and was officially incorporated in 1989. Its initial operations were devoted to research, development and commercialization of products which provided audio and voice capabilities to personal computers and over computer networks. Cohen and Haramaty developed and manufactured a PC sound card (SpeechBoard TM) that was sold mainly to the local market for various uses such as educational, advertising, radio broadcasting and to the visually-impaired community in Israel with a unique Text to Speech software enabling blind people to use a computer in Hebrew as well as English. As Text to Speech was not available in Hebrew at all, and rarely available in English, they developed both from scratch, utilizing Haramaty's voice, and a user-update-able dictionary of words that was periodically merged between all users.