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

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.