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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.