Fetching Your Voicemail from the PC?

Ben Jackson asks: "I subscribe to the phone company's voicemail offering because it can take messages even when the line is busy. Although I would prefer vgetty, I can't afford to have several lines and a hunt group just to avoid missing calls. What I'm looking for is a tool you could call `fetchvmail' -- it would use a voice modem to retrieve voicemail and forward it on as a MIME attachment. Does anything like this exist?" We already have mgetty-voice and its ilk, why not something like this? Since many phone companies are now providing voice mail with the service, this would be a very useful utility indeed.

Comments

BuzMe

[DaoudaW]

I'm using a commercial service called BuzMe It provides the functionality you request. If you are online you get an instant messenger type pop-up, which gives you the option to accept the call (which would drop your modem), type a response, or let the caller leave a message.

No linux support, but otherwise it works for me.

hit the telephony sites

[drowsy]

http://www.linuxtelephony.com/
good starting point. Pointers to perl modules that allow you to control a voicemodem.

http://www.ostel.com/
Mostly geared toward being your IVR rather than responding, but they might be worth looking at, in case their cards and software can fill your need.

Might be hard to do

[eap]

There are utilities like mgetty-voice that you can use to control a voice modem. However, the hard part would be getting your modem to recognize the voicemail system's voice prompts, like, "Press 7 to hear the next message" and such. Computers can recognize dtmf tones, but I suspect they would have difficulty navigating most VM systems, which only provide voice cues.

Maybe there is another way to do this that I'm not thinking about. Perhaps you could have your voicemail system default to forwarding its message to a paging system with an internet gateway or something.

Re:Might be hard to do

[guiding_knight]

All you'd need to do is compare with a saved sound sample. You could record each number and set up a loop to continue while there are still messages. The structure of VM systems is relatively simple, so a few if statements should cover most possibilities, and have it alert the user if an exception occurs.

Re:Might be hard to do

[eap]

The only way I can think of to compare two sound files is with md5sum. Your saved sound sample probably won't compare exactly with what your voice modem hears each time due to timing and line noise differences. If they are not exactly alike, you won't get a match.

whats the standard protocol?

[josepha48]

Or is there one. I'd imagine if there is a protocol for this thing then it could be easily written.

CAn you be online and retrieve the data from the mailbox?