Personal CallerID-Aware 'Answering Machines'? 37
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?
How do you do that? (Score:1)
you could just buy one (Score:1)
Re:How do you do that? (Score:2)
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Some starting code (Score:2)
Re:Here's something... from JWZ yet. (Score:1)
vgetty itself was easy to setup and get going. I didn't have any problems at all really... Plus you can customize it with a perl to script how answering should be done (supposedly). They are working on scripting vgetty for more control on actions based on caller id so I'm not sure what the status at this exact point in time is...
Use more cunning dialog (Score:1)
Re:Here's something... from JWZ yet. (Score:2)
Actually, that's all you need to nail them. If there is no ID, (Out of Area or Private/Blocked ANI), then the phone doesn't ring. That how Ameritechs "Privacy Manager" service works. All unidentified callers get a recording that asks them to leave their name. After that, it rings your phone and tell you that there is a call from $PERSON. You have the option to take the call, refuse the call, or refuse the call with a "go away" message. Much as I hate giving more money to Ameritech, it's worth it to avoid those assholes.
"Privacy Manager" also gives the option of setting up a PIN to ring straight through, in case someone has a real reason to get through, but has to call from a payphone, cellphone, or through AT&T provided service. That would be a nice addition to this sort of thing, too.
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Re:How do you do that? (Score:2)
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Re:An extension (Score:2)
At home, though, something open that would do some of this would get my juices going.
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This exists. (Score:2)
Re:New application: Telemarketer Turing Test (Score:1)
Re:Use more cunning dialog (Score:1)
I like that idea. Also you could try "Excuse me, could you hold on for a second?", put him on hold for 3 minutes, then say "Ok, I'm back, I forgot where we were, could you explain things again?"
Re:New application: Telemarketer Turing Test (Score:1)
New application: Telemarketer Turing Test (Score:3)
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.
Uptimes is the key (Score:2)
8,760 hours in a year (365*24)
99% uptime is 87.6 hours of downtime
99.9% uptime is 8.76 hours of downtime
99.99% uptime is
Most businesses I've seen do some numbers magic by not including off-business hours, which then gives you about 6,000 hours per year to be down.
As fancy as we all consider the phone company stuff to be, it's still got a big primitive factor in it, because primitive stuff breaks less often, and is easier to fix when it does break.
Here's something... from JWZ yet. (Score:4)
Not something straight forward and stand alone, his solution [jwz.org] covers everything from determining whether or not the phone will ring to pulling up information on the caller [jwz.org] -- 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) [jwz.org]
- Database Program: The Insidious Big Brother Database [sourceforge.net]
- CODE: Modem control & database interface [jwz.org]
- CODE: Phone-ring-sound script [jwz.org] (Parts are specific to SGI)
- CODE: Laptop-Home call notification [jwz.org]
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 toMy friend just wrote one of these... (Score:2)
It's very cool! I'll try to get him to post on this thread with more details.
some existing tech (Score:3)
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.
The BASIC Stamp rules (Score:2)
Once I have this beast under control, a smart CLID box is tops on my list; my intention was just to make the phone not ring when it's a telemarketer, but I like this idea even better. Please do post your schematic and code once you get it going!
For those who want to make a simple Caller ID box, a generous fellow has already posted the details of his project [earthlink.net]. For more information, check out Parallax [parallaxinc.com], the makers of the Stamp, and the BASIC Stamp FAQ [al-williams.com]. To get an idea of what you can do, see the List of Stamp Applications (LOSA) [hth.com], the first item of which is, no foolin', a cyborg cat.
Here in Cali (Score:2)
Alas, this doesn't work on most telemarketers. Reputable ones show up with a name and number, and disreputable ones just appear as "UNAVAILABLE" on my current Caller ID box.
Like the earlier poster, I'd be all over a MAPS-style database of telemarketers and other low-lifes, but it'll be a while before enough of us have the hardware to make it worthwhile. In another decade or two, though, I'm sure all the phones will come with a TCP/IP stack, and then we'll be in business. Of course, by then the direct marketers will be using microwaves to wiggle your tympanic membrane [m-w.com].
Open Source Hardware (Score:1)
I've been thinking alot lately how open source hardware could work for general social benefit and profit making.
Imagine that you developed a neat circuit like the one described above, and posted schematics circuit board layouts to the web, GPL'd of course.
Now you could make a small profit by selling boards, kits or fully assembled items
Of course, magazines have been doing this for 30 years, but the projects always seem to be simplistic and ill thought out. Imagine what would happen if you could get multiple engineers from various disciplines to contribute!
-Loopy
vgetty experiences - YMMV. (Score:1)
I used to have problems with it picking up back when I was running RC5, but none since I stopped.
I keep meaning to make it more extensive, and eventually add in stuff like Home Automation links, but that's still in the Thinking-about-it stage.
Oh, and I'm using a Rockwell chipset modem, allegedly one of the worst for voice.
A distributed Blackhole list is a great idea. (Score:3)
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.
Re:Look here (Score:1)
[vm]getty+sendfax (Score:1)
bad idea (Score:1)
Pretty much every major Telco and Network player has a CTI product on the market, and there are PC-based PBX products out there (some even run on NT).
But transferring Telco responsibilities to an IS department is a bad idea, replacing phones with PCs is even worse. How many IS departments are prepared to provide 99.999% (if not higher!) uptime at the network and desktop level? Computers crash. Or worse, they have "problems" -- drivers, viruses, just plain flakiness.
Imagine how costly it is for the average business to be without phone service for an hour. It's a completely devastating situation for even the smallest call center.
Excellent Idea, too bad I patented it! :^) (Score:2)
Actually I have no doubt that somebody has patented it. Actually I've been playing around with a system that does something similar using the following.
Right now if a call is "out of area" it forwards them to a fake "automated phone menu system" that is designed to waste time and extract a little vengence. ];^D from telemarketers!
I plan on adding a DTMF decoder, and a circuit to generate ring voltage so that I can redirect the call to a normal answering machine or if a friend enters a code after the "phone menu" rings my regular phone.
A friend says I should market it, frankly I would much rather put the cicuit and software out on the net once I get past the bread board stage. Though I may very well market it, but my luck I *will* be violating somebody else's IP and go out of buisness. So far I have not looked to see if it's patented, there is less liability if you don't look!
- subsolar
Manual Intervention (Score:1)
Basically for a price (25 cents) you have a real time reverse directory lookup feature. On the tip of the menubutton you get the callers name and address, with a few caveats of course:
If the number is blocked it obviously doesn't work
If the number's not listed (which is mostly the case with cell phone numbers) it doesn't work of course
It certainly only works on domestic calls.
Recently a head a brain dead market researcher calling 13 (!) times, I just ignored them after looking them up...
Re:My friend just wrote one of these... (Score:1)
Re:Here in Cali (Score:1)
This doesn't work on smaller outfits, but those are mostly local, and often charities that I don't mind hearing from anyway, so this works out pretty well for me. And, if for some reason one of the slimy ones gets through, well, it's always entertaining to jerk them around for a few minutes while they're on the clock.
Big Company Solution (Score:2)
Look here (Score:3)
Re:Easy stuff. Just download vgetty (Score:1)
for ages (has this changed at all?).
I ended up hacking together something using TCL/Expect ('cause I don't like perl)
and for the CID stuff, xmessage, (a la JWZ).
I have yet to build the answering machine stuff, but so far vgetty's source looks rather obfuscated in areas.
Festival seems to be a nice way to go for this, both for messages (outgoing) and for
announcing callers. Only problem is that it needs a bit more than that old P100 that's
been sitting collecting dust! On my old NAT router/CallerID/testbed box (P133) it takes
around 10 seconds to put together a short phrase ("It's that annoying dickhead calling again").
Re:An extension (Score:1)
Our Nortel PBX came into service in 1994. It has been moved, dropped (raju1kabir takes a bow), had its power cut, and suffered who-knows-what other indignities.
Nothing has ever gone wrong.
It is indestructible and unflappable. That's how I want business phone service to be. The only time we ever interact with it is when we need to add/subtract/move lines or stations, or install a software upgrade (easy as removing one Atari-style cartridge and sticking in another).
Contrast that to general-purpose computers. They crash. They're finicky about environment and power drops. They require security patches and constant software upgrades.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all in favor of exciting new ways of doing things, and I think you have some interesting ideas (many already realized in CTI products on the market) about how to converge phones with other communications. But I don't think it's really ready for prime time yet.
Easy stuff. Just download vgetty (Score:3)
There's a package called vgetty [greenie.net] 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 [ed.ac.uk].
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.
An extension (Score:2)
Basically, I was wondering if it'd be possible for an organization to do away with the proprietary phone systems in place, instead having a server handling all inbound and outbound calls, plus voicemail and the like.
Ok, so far sounds like what the company has already, but instead, perhaps a Linux server with a bunch of voice modems, piping the phone conversations to the desktop computers of the employees. Calls out naturally get thrown out of the pool of available lines, calls in get redirected by extension to the appropriate user's IP address.
Do away with the phone, however, and replace with headset connected to soundcard, and some sort of "dialler" program, which basically connects you to one of the modems across the LAN on the server.
Using this system, couldn't companies just have their IS department handle the phones? I'd imagine this should decrease overhead (in personnel and in cabling, I guess). Probably increase security too, because it means that no one can use your phone on your desk unless they're logged in to your workstation. Forget long distance dialling codes - the server knows who you are already. Forget voicemail passwords - you're logged in already. Hell - launch your voicemail from the company intranet or groupware package (ie: outlook).
Is this sort of thing feasible, or am I missing something critical which is a showstopper?
It's patented by AT&T (Score:1)