Home-Based, LAN-Capable, PC Phone Answering Machines?

jqh1 asks: "I have a voice capable modem somewhere around here -- I've dabbled in Windows based answering machine software without success and now use a plain old answering machine (the frustrating kind). I have a 100mbs home network that includes a linux box right next to a phone jack. What's the best way to rig up a reliable answering machine system on that box, and rig it so that message are accessible from any other computer (incl. some windows boxen). I have some half baked ideas (using audix-type software and samba), but I'd love to hear suggestions."

Comments

use zyxel1496u+ with vgetty/mgetty+sendfax

[Anonymous Coward]

see subject

Go to voice mail

[bluGill]

For about $5/month my local phone company will provide me with an ansering machine that will take a message when I'm on the phone with someone else. I can get these messages from any room in my house. (I think I can get them from elsewhere too, but now use a cell phone for all my voice calls so I'm not sure, byond what I see others doing)

Sure you can come up with a linux/windows/mac solution that will work, but when your on the phone with someone else your still out of luck.

Re:Go to voice mail

[mrzaph0d]

what about something that would dial-out into the voicemail system when you are done with the call, retrieve is and record the message to .wav or something, and then be able to serve it up? now that's something i'd be interested in...

Re:Go to voice mail

[detritus.]

For about $5/month my local phone company will provide me with an ansering machine that will take a message when I'm on the phone with someone else. I can get these messages from any room in my house. (I think I can get them from elsewhere too, but now use a cell phone for all my voice calls so I'm not sure, byond what I see others doing)

I had voice mail through Ameritech and was not too impressed. Something to keep in mind is limitations on outgoing calls. If you check your voice mail (by dialing a number) that's one call. Checking voice mail 2 or 3 times a day * 30 days can rack up a nice chunk of your available outgoing calls before getting surcharged.

I personally wanted a very powerful voice mail system with tons of options. Ureach, which up until recently would give you a personal free 800 number and 60 minutes of call-time (the idea was to get you to use more than 60 mins and buy time). Now you have to pay for the service, but still for what you get it's dirt cheap, and the customization and features is by far the most impressive I have ever seen.

What you could do is setup call forwarding with voicemail (which usually is a small fee per month) and have it forward on busy. This in essence is the same as the telco's voicemail, but instead you forward unanswered calls to your ureach number, instead of the telco's answering service. The nice thing is I usually setup ureach to notify me via email or IM that I have new messages, I log in, and play them back over the web..

IMHO, this is the best, powerful call management provider i've seen. Monthly rates are incredibly cheap for what you can get (the most expensive plan is like $10/mo).

- Slash

My problem with vgetty...

[Van Halen]

As far as I know, it doesn't let you make any decisions on what to do before picking up, based on callerid. I used to have a system where it would answer on the first ring if callerid was "Unavailable" (always telemarketers). It was based on the voice modem package I found here. I hacked the shell script in that package to convert to perl and added the callerid functionality. Problem was, I switched to FreeBSD back in December and the accompanying "voice modem control program" in that package would neither run as a linux binary or as compiled for FreeBSD natively. So, I set out to find/develop a better solution.

I think I'm most of the way there, but I haven't had time to finish it in a couple months. Basically I translated the voice modem control program's functionality to a perl module so the entire thing could be in perl. I had grand ideas of developing it so that other people could add modules for other modems (mine's a USR interal voice modem), and make it into a nice user-friendly package that many people could use. Oh, if only I had the time... ;-)

For now, til I finish that up, I'm using a pretty generic configuration of vgetty. It works, but it's not pretty. Not only do I not have the luxury of callerid-based actions before pickup, but vgetty seems to not be able to detect dial tone and end the recording of incoming messages very well. I get all these telemarketer hangup messages that end up being 2 minutes of dial tone/"please hang up and try your call again" messages. Those messages shouldn't even get that far - the dial tone should be detected and a short message discarded.

Anyway, once you get messages saved onto disk, converting them to an appropriate format and making available over the network is pretty easy to do with some scripts, utilities, etc as others have alluded. Feel free to email me if you're interested in this thing I'm working on, just no guarantees about a timely release! ;-)

VOCPSystem

[jfunk]

Check out VOCPSystem.

It looks extremely cool, and I'm thinking of setting it up at home. The only thing I need is a voice modem, which I'm sure I can get for dirt.

One cool feature is the ability to run commands from your phone. Imagine getting an email to your phone when something goes wrong, and using your phone to restart the service. That's also cool because we can receive email in my service area, but can't send it. With VOCPsystem on my home box, I'll be able to send email that way.

Modem will ring a phone?

[kbyrd]

I've been thinking about this sort of thing for some time, but the system I want is that a caller is greeted by a menu that ends up with one of three states:

1. Caller gets disconnected
2. Caller gets to leave a voice message
3. Caller get's rung thru to a regular phone connected to the PC

1 and 2 appear to be easy, just sending sound files to the voice modem, number 3 is proving hard. From what I've seen, voice modems won't generate their own ring signal to phones connected to them they can only pass the signal coming from the line. Does anyone know of hardware (controllable by software on the PC) that will do this? The closest I've seen is the Quicknet LineJack. But I'm having trouble getting details on it. To see what it'll actually do.

write yourself

[multriha]

All you need is something which will answer the phone, play a wav file to it, then record a wav from.

Build into that or have a seperate program, to convert to mp3's any wavs which are lying around.

Simple http server (password protected, ssl if you're paranoid) to access the messages.

Setup a nice little web interface if you want to be fancy

I've wanted one of those..

[cmowire]

I've actually wanted one of those boxes for a while.

I would say that there is a LOT of potential there. You could have it synch with your addressbook and read the caller ID data. Thus, you would be able to tag who called and e-mail you that information.

I'd say that your best bet is to encode it in some sort of well-compressed file format, once you get it off of the modem. MPEG layer 3 would work just about anywhere, so you'd probably want to just use that as the file format.

I would say that for everything but the actual MP3 audio, and perhaps even the audio, you might just want to use PostGreSQL to store the data. It's accessible under Linux, and it's also accessible via ODBC with PsqlODBC. That way, you have the option for multiple interfaces. You can write a windows and Linux binary client, plus a web-client (Which is nice if you are at the office and want to check the home phone messages).

And, of course, check out Freshmeat to see if there's anything useful. I found KPhoneCenter and the VoiceModem Kit.