Today's desktop users are relying on communication software on their computer systems. They are forced to switch between different applications for the different protocols and communication methods (text chat, telephony, etc.) they are using. These applications usually are poorly integrated with each other, thus requiring the users to interact with several applications to do simple things like setting their online status to "away" on all communication channels they are using. Developers have a hard time integrating realtime communication features into their applications. There are no standard API to realtime communication systems: Each protocol tends to come as a library. Each of these libraries implements a different programming interface. This is why we have so many communication applications today, each build around one (set of) protocol libraries. Once a developer masters a protocol library he still needs to implement services like communication account storage, etc. Since these are of little interest to application developers that are not writting communication applications there is little or no integration of realtime communication features into desktop applications.

Decibel addresses the needs of several groups of users:

• Hardware vendors and system integrators
  Decibel follows the telepathy specification for its protocol engines (or connection managers in telepathy lingo). This API is becoming a important standard for low-level communication drivers in the linux world. By providing a connection manager implementing the telepathy API hardware vendors can add linux support for their equipment which integrates well in both the KDE and Gnome desktop environment.
• Application developers
  Decibel makes it easy to integrate advanced realtime communication features into your applications. This way Decibel enables communication and ultimately collaboration features in all kind of applications.
  Possible usecases include offering a „chat with document author“ button in an word processor, voice communication in games or telephony applications for call center use. Since Decibel ifself is desktop independent it will ease the development of cross plattform communication applications.
• Desktop users
  Desktop users will benefit from Decibel by having a central place to manage their communication accounts and settings. This includes setting preferred GUIs for all the possible communication methods. Decibel will then automatically start applications as required by the user's communication needs.