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Home-Based, LAN-Capable, PC Phone Answering Machines? 23

Posted by Cliff from the do-it-yourself dept.
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."
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Home-Based, LAN-Capable, PC Phone Answering Machines? More

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

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  • vgetty with perl (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    we use vgetty with perl and php - once you get vgetty to pick up the call and launch perl, you can code it up pretty easily. We got it to let us manage our accounts over the phone or via the web interface. Recently, I got around to compiling a version of sox with support for GSM-encoded wav files, which will let me knock the size of the wavs way down for access over dialup.

    ps. - don't convert to mp3, it doesn't save any space on crappy voice-only streams - the GSM wavs are the way to go.

    cbh275 AT yahoo DOT com

  • Re:vgetty with perl (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I experimented with a 1-minute voicemail, which was about 580k as a straight wav. Blade produced a 580k mp3 (huh?), mp3encode produced one which was 280k (not bad). But when I got the source to sox and gsmlib, and I compiled gsmlib -DWAV49 and compiled sox -lgsm, I got a version of sox which can generate wavs which use gsm for compression ("sox 1.wav -g 1_gsm.wav"). The resulting wav file was 118K, without any noteworthy loss in sound quality. GSM is the right technology, I think - a lossy algorithm designed for low-quality, voice-only streams. cbh275 AT yahoo DOT com

  • use zyxel1496u+ with vgetty/mgetty+sendfax (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    see subject

  • Go to voice mail (Score:3)

    by bluGill ( 862 ) on Wednesday March 28, 2001 @11:52AM (#333375)

    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.

  • I agree but if you decide not to use a Zyxel modem (they are expensive) go to the mgetty mailing list and see the archive for modem recommendations. The modem you happen to have sitting around most likey won't work well. I happened to have a Rockwell-based 33.6 voice modem that performs decently at voice (but having problems, going to buy a properly supported one soon). Unforunately it looks like the mailing list archive is down but they just had a thread on modems recommended for vgetty...
  • I think the whole point is to get away from voice mail. Personally I find voice mail to be completely annoying - it's just a waste of time navigating via a touchpad and not being able to see caller id information, date, and time in a simple list. I much prefer my vgetty solution with these details and a link for listing to the messages (in mp3 format) over a voice mail system. I prefer to exchange the ease of use of this system over getting messages while I'm on the line.
  • In my experience I've found converting the wav files to mp3 to save quite a bit of space. I use pvftowav without any switches - are you doing something there to make the file size smaller?
  • just turn the phone ringer off, and play a ringing sound of your choice!
    that is what I am working on in my system, anyway!
    ;-}
  • 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...

  • Hate to criticize /., but this same topic was posted just over a month ago in Ask Slashdot. By Cliff, who posted this. Comeon, guys.

    Personal CallerID-Aware 'Answering Machines'? by Cliff on Tuesday February 20 [slashdot.org]

    Lots of information about Caller-ID, with selected actions based on calling number, but also more basic stuff.

  • 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 [apsoftware.it]. 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! ;-)

  • Check out VOCPSystem [sourceforge.net].

    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.
  • This is not quite the angle you were looking for, but you might find it interesting or useful. Their service would let you do this and much more. However, not using your phone number... They give you a number, calls to it generate an http query, you implement the XML to drive their telephony server. See http://www.voxeo.com [voxeo.com] . I am not connected with voxeo in anyway.

  • 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 [ureach.com], 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
  • Bayonne [gnu.org]

    Bayonne, the telecommunications application server of
    the GNU project, will offer a free, scalable, media
    independent software environment for development and
    deployment of telephony solutions for use with current
    and next generation telephone networks. Bayonne
    already offers a fully distributed application server for
    use today with multi-line telephony cards from many
    vendors under free operating systems.

    This works great with the single line Quicknet [quicknet.net] Cards as well.
  • That should have been Bayonne [gnu.org]

    It's late here I apoligize.
  • Thought of that, I want a real ring, I could be upstairs, outside, wherever. I take a cordless with me now and it'll ring, I don't want to jack up my PC's speaker volume or run extra speaker wire to hear a phone ring
  • 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 [quicknet.com] LineJack. But I'm having trouble getting details on it. To see what it'll actually do.
  • I am currently in the process of writing such a program.. uses vgetty and a lot of custom perl. call in setup, cell and pager call back, different mailboxes, gtk interface for local use, web interface for remote use. Email me and i might be able to help you out..
    shroom at perilith dot com
  • An idea on handling getting the messages would include grabbing the phone number from call display and cross referencing it with info from a reverse telephone lookup service. Then you can pass all the information into e-mail form, then to check your messages all you have to do is fire up your e-mail client and it'll show up if a new message is waiting and you can even include the audio file as an attachment. This would also make it pretty easy to get your messages from anywhere in the world.

    Just an idea, I believe Nortel or someone is doing something similar to this so I guess I'm really stealing thier idea, but it sounds like a fairly good one to me.

    Although not the same project at all, JWZ [jwz.org] uses his computer for caller identification [jwz.org]. You may want to check that out for some ideas, especially if you want to log caller id info.
  • 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

  • Thanks everyone -- didn't expect so much signal and so little noise. Being a DIY perl fan, I'll probably gravitate toward the perl/vgetty approach, but will definitely check out the other info.

  • 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 [readysetnet.com] to store the data. It's accessible under Linux, and it's also accessible via ODBC with PsqlODBC [postgresql.org]. 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 [freshmeat.net] to see if there's anything useful. I found KPhoneCenter [sourceforge.net] and the VoiceModem Kit [freshmeat.net].

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