Personal CallerID-Aware 'Answering Machines'?

vaxer asks: "Scientist and novelist William Calvin wrote a 'RingController' into chapter four of Synchronized: A Novel of the Internet Era. Our heroine uses it to manage what happens to incoming phone calls based on the source, time of day, and other preferences. Some calls get a 'no soliciting' message, others get a friendly 'I'm Not In' message, and a select few actually make her phone ring. Callers on a list of 'Voicemail Violators and Persistent Pests' get a devilishly unhelpful message. (The novel doesn't suggest a shared blackhole list of boiler rooms and other cold-callers, but I'm sure it could be done) Are there any such devices available for sale?" The technology does exist to create something like this, right now...however it still requires hardware usually only found in call centers and corporate voicemail hell. Is this tech ready to move into the home, if so, what do you need and is it still prohibitively expensive?

Comments

Re:How do you do that?

[ry4an]

Currently I just forward notification of the call time, source, and number to my cell phone when I get a call from people on a select list.
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Some starting code

[djweis]

There is some code on cpan that can give you a good start with a voice modem for this.

Re:Here's something... from JWZ yet.

[sharkey]

Too bad they program their PBXs to give out the "Out of Area" code.

Actually, that's all you need to nail them. If there is no ID, (Out of Area or Private/Blocked ANI), then the phone doesn't ring. That how Ameritechs "Privacy Manager" service works. All unidentified callers get a recording that asks them to leave their name. After that, it rings your phone and tell you that there is a call from $PERSON. You have the option to take the call, refuse the call, or refuse the call with a "go away" message. Much as I hate giving more money to Ameritech, it's worth it to avoid those assholes.

"Privacy Manager" also gives the option of setting up a PIN to ring straight through, in case someone has a real reason to get through, but has to call from a payphone, cellphone, or through AT&T provided service. That would be a nice addition to this sort of thing, too.

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Re:How do you do that?

[sharkey]

With Ameritech, you can forward No Answer, or just plain Forward All Calls. They offer these sevices a la carte, I think, and they also have them as a package w/Caller-ID, Call Waiting, 3-way, etc.

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Re:An extension

[sharkey]

That's very nice, but when you buy a PBX from a REPUTABLE vendor/manufacturer, you get what you pay for. We recently paid $70,000.00+ for a PBX switch w/voice mail that will do LCR outbound, selecting our T-1 for long distance, or our PRI for toll-free, DID inbound voice, hunt groups for incoming calls, auto attendant and basic voice mail. It can do 6-way conferences, in-house forwarding and follow-me, and 3-way calls. We can page through the phone. If we are someday willing to pay some ungodly amount, it will do what the poster is asking. But, unlike a PC, the only time it has gone down on us was when the power was out for a couple hours (Big UPS). It is well past 99.999% reliability. Our biggest trouble is AT&T, who love to play Point-The-Finger almost as much as MCI. Granted, we could probably contract w/a Perl contractor or three and a Linux/*BSD conslutant to put together a box for you (P-III, Cyclades card, shitload of Sportsters, etc) for a fraction of the cost, but it wouldn't be as solid.

At home, though, something open that would do some of this would get my juices going.

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This exists.

[raygundan]

Interactive Intelligence (www.inter-intelli.com) sells stuff like that. They still use normal phones, but they can be cheapo $15 phones since all of the intelligence is moved to the PC.

New application: Telemarketer Turing Test

[meldroc]

Here's a little project for those of you who are dedicated to wasting as much of your friendly telemarketer's time as possible. When the phone rings, and Caller-ID shows up as Unavailable, let the computer have a nice, long conversation with him.

When the computer picks up, it plays back a "Hello?" recording, pauses, plays "Hello?" again, to fool the predictive dialers. Then it listens for speech on the other end. When the speech pauses, the computer plays back one of a group of recordings such as "Uh-huh", "Okay", "I'm listening", "Sounds good", to fool the teledroid into thinking a live person is on the other end.

Here's the challenge. Who can keep a telemarketer talking to his computer for the longest time? The winner gets bragging rights and contributes towards making the world telemarketer free.

Uptimes is the key

[scotpurl]

You've got it right. Uptimes for computers is nothing compared to the uptimes Cable, and phones all have (at least where I've lived. YMMV). Some handy numbers (but check my math).

8,760 hours in a year (365*24)
99% uptime is 87.6 hours of downtime
99.9% uptime is 8.76 hours of downtime
99.99% uptime is .876 hours (almost 53 minutes)

Most businesses I've seen do some numbers magic by not including off-business hours, which then gives you about 6,000 hours per year to be down.

As fancy as we all consider the phone company stuff to be, it's still got a big primitive factor in it, because primitive stuff breaks less often, and is easier to fix when it does break.

Here's something... from JWZ yet.

[Raetsel]

Jamie Zawinski (AKA jwz, famous for the camouflage netting tent at Netscape and the DNA Lounge nightclub) put together something like this when he was frustrated by vgetty.

Not something straight forward and stand alone, his solution covers everything from determining whether or not the phone will ring to pulling up information on the caller -- similar to what William Calvin describes.

• It listens to the com port of a standard voice modem for Caller-ID info
• Based on the Caller-ID (and its' entry in the database) it determines what action to take
• Time-of-day and screensaver aware -- if you're asleep (and your computer is too), the phone doesn't ring.

Now, I don't see the recording part that you need here. As far as I can tell, this is a 'ring the phone only for people I care about, and then only when I'm awake' kind of thing.

The code for all this is available, perhaps it will help push things in the right direction.

• Program Description: Caller ID Hack (Overview)
• Database Program: The Insidious Big Brother Database
• CODE: Modem control & database interface
• CODE: Phone-ring-sound script (Parts are specific to SGI)
• CODE: Laptop-Home call notification

I know it's an incomplete solution... but it might help in building something that will do what you want. I really like the idea of a MAPS/ORBS style telemarketer list so you can forward them to /dev/null. Too bad they program their PBXs to give out the "Out of Area" code.

My friend just wrote one of these...

[look]

My friend just wrote one of these in Perl. All his calls to his house are answered by his modem, which has CallerID. He uses a Perl script which interfaces with the command line address book 'abook' to determine what to do with the call. He has the option to ignore the call, send it to his cell phone, or send it to his home phone. I believe he also has it set up so that if the call goes to his home phone and he doesn't answer, it will get forwarded to his cell phone.

It's very cool! I'll try to get him to post on this thread with more details.

some existing tech

[boarder]

Well, Bang & Olufsen, the amazing audiophile and high-end a/v company from Europe, make a telephone system that can play to the caller one of up to (I think) 4 different answering machine messages depending on their caller ID. It will also tell you with an audio voice who is calling if their ID is one that you have programmed. It even ties into their A/V equipment to turn the volume down when a call comes in.

It is an utterly ludicrous phone system at a matching price, but it looks cool and you can have a phone with a remote control.

The BASIC Stamp rules

[dubl-u]

Just today I received a BASIC Stamp kit, and I'm loving it. Anybody who can code their way out of a paper bag can use one of these to do all sorts of cool electronics work.

Once I have this beast under control, a smart CLID box is tops on my list; my intention was just to make the phone not ring when it's a telemarketer, but I like this idea even better. Please do post your schematic and code once you get it going!

For those who want to make a simple Caller ID box, a generous fellow has already posted the details of his project. For more information, check out Parallax, the makers of the Stamp, and the BASIC Stamp FAQ. To get an idea of what you can do, see the List of Stamp Applications (LOSA), the first item of which is, no foolin', a cyborg cat.

Here in Cali

[dubl-u]

Here in California, one of the free features you can get from PacBell is "anonymous call rejection". So if somebody is blocking Caller ID, they get a recording when they call you telling them that they need to unblock Caller ID if they want to reach you.

Alas, this doesn't work on most telemarketers. Reputable ones show up with a name and number, and disreputable ones just appear as "UNAVAILABLE" on my current Caller ID box.

Like the earlier poster, I'd be all over a MAPS-style database of telemarketers and other low-lifes, but it'll be a while before enough of us have the hardware to make it worthwhile. In another decade or two, though, I'm sure all the phones will come with a TCP/IP stack, and then we'll be in business. Of course, by then the direct marketers will be using microwaves to wiggle your tympanic membrane.

A distributed Blackhole list is a great idea.

[MrEfficient]

I've actually been working on a program that will make my computer be an intelligent ringer for my phone. It will also print out the caller-id info to the screen and log it. It will also check the time and decide whether or not its too late to ring the phone. It's still in a very primitive stage right now though. There are alot of caller-id progs out there to learn from, although I'm having a hard time reading and understanding other people's code. Just do a search for caller id on Freshmeat.

I had the idea that I wanted to log that info to a database where I could then assign a priority number to each record in a table that contained unique numbers. Telemarketers and pests might get a priority of 0 which would mean the phone wouldn't ring. If a standard format for a blackhole list existed, maybe it could be distributed a la junkbuster. Maybe then we could do for ourselves what the phone company should be doing in the first place, block telemarketers.

A more polished service might even be built around this to provide this sort of functionality to those who don't have computers, which is what I think your talking about, a smart answering machine. I believe that this is a product you will eventually see on the market, its just a matter of when. In the mean time, some people will make their own.

Excellent Idea, too bad I patented it! :^)

[subsolar2]

JK.

Actually I have no doubt that somebody has patented it. Actually I've been playing around with a system that does something similar using the following.

• Pallalax Basic STAMP
• ISD 240sec voice storage IC
• Motorola Caller-ID chip
• Pair of relays
• Misc analog componets.

Right now if a call is "out of area" it forwards them to a fake "automated phone menu system" that is designed to waste time and extract a little vengence. ];^D from telemarketers!

I plan on adding a DTMF decoder, and a circuit to generate ring voltage so that I can redirect the call to a normal answering machine or if a friend enters a code after the "phone menu" rings my regular phone.

A friend says I should market it, frankly I would much rather put the cicuit and software out on the net once I get past the bread board stage. Though I may very well market it, but my luck I *will* be violating somebody else's IP and go out of buisness. So far I have not looked to see if it's patented, there is less liability if you don't look!

- subsolar

Big Company Solution

[hellsop]

Ameritech (for all its faults) offers a service ver much like this, including allowances for authorized callers to break through and ring the phone when away from their caller-ID-listed phone lines. Search for "Privacy Manager" on their website.

Look here

[jdevons]

Look here

Easy stuff. Just download vgetty

[raju1kabir]

There's a package called vgetty that will let you do exactly what you're after.

Assuming you have a caller-ID-capable voice modem and a beat-up old unixish computer lying around, you can do pretty much anything you can think up.

The key to most of the call filtering stuff is to turn off the ringers on your phones and instead hook a speaker to the box you have running vgetty. Someone calls in, your box answers it, and if it likes the caller it plays ringback into the modem and generates an audible signal through the external speaker (this signal, of course, can vary based on caller ID or on a PIN the caller entered). If it doesn't like them, it can tell them why or just hang up.

Coupled with caller ID, you can do things like having different messages for different callers (for instance, people you know can always get a recording with your pager and cellphone numbers, while strangers just get the standard). You can have it never wake you up prior to 10am, unless someone touch-tones in a special code you've given them. If you have two phone lines and a little extra hardware, you can do discretionary follow-me forwarding so certain people can always find you. If you live in an area where pay phones accept incoming calls, you can use your two phone lines to make unlimited-length, unlimited-number calls for a quarter (plus your home landline call cost, which shouldn't be much) from any pay phone. You can make the phone of your choice into your personal private office. The sky's the limit.

My next project is to make it so I can call in to my 800 number and have it read my email to me using Festival.

After that, I've got to do something about my apartment building entry system - the landlord charges $50 for extra Mul-T-Lock keys (anyone know where I can get them copied on the sly?), so when I have visitors stay over, we have to play the key trading game. I'd like to be able to give my computer a heads up with my cell phone, and then if I call it from the box downstairs within the next couple minutes, it will just send the tone to pop open the door for me.

An extension

[JediTrainer]

I have an idea which seems like an extension of this. Maybe it's pointless, but then again maybe it's not.

Basically, I was wondering if it'd be possible for an organization to do away with the proprietary phone systems in place, instead having a server handling all inbound and outbound calls, plus voicemail and the like.

Ok, so far sounds like what the company has already, but instead, perhaps a Linux server with a bunch of voice modems, piping the phone conversations to the desktop computers of the employees. Calls out naturally get thrown out of the pool of available lines, calls in get redirected by extension to the appropriate user's IP address.

Do away with the phone, however, and replace with headset connected to soundcard, and some sort of "dialler" program, which basically connects you to one of the modems across the LAN on the server.

Using this system, couldn't companies just have their IS department handle the phones? I'd imagine this should decrease overhead (in personnel and in cabling, I guess). Probably increase security too, because it means that no one can use your phone on your desk unless they're logged in to your workstation. Forget long distance dialling codes - the server knows who you are already. Forget voicemail passwords - you're logged in already. Hell - launch your voicemail from the company intranet or groupware package (ie: outlook).

Is this sort of thing feasible, or am I missing something critical which is a showstopper?