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.

What about using YAC?

[atomice]

I'm not quite sure this is what you wanted, but if you are looking for a voicemail -> e-mail gateway, then check out YAC (www.yac.com). It can also do fax -> e-mail too.

BuzMe

[DaoudaW]

I'm using a commercial service called BuzMe [buzme.com] 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/ [linuxtelephony.com]
good starting point. Pointers to perl modules that allow you to control a voicemodem.

http://www.ostel.com/ [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.

Look at it in analog...

[bacchus612]

Input your sound sample -> convert to waveform.
Input sample to compare -> """"""""""""""""""""

Then all you have to do is compare the shape of the two waveforms, assuming you have a reasonably consistant connection, and are willing to do a little performance tuning (i.e. setting the acceptable difference between the two waves), it wouldn't be that hard.

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?

Check with the voicemail provider

[blogan]

Check with the provider of the voice mail system. They might have an application already. Whether or not it works under WINE might be a different story.

AUDIX Systems

[smatthew]

There exists software for AUDIX voice mail systems that allows you to retrieve voice mail over the network. They recently demonstrated it my workplace as a way to let teleworkers check their office voicemail without having to dial into the AUDIX system.

Will you local telco ever provide this service? Doubt it.

mbox.com.au

[drsparkly]

MBOX [mbox.com.au] are an Australian `Unified Messaging Provider'. For my $AU10 per month I get a webmail box, 2 numbers, and I get voicemails delivered to this mailbox as wav or mp3, and also faxes delivered as gif. Plus regular e-mail, a Windows notification client, notifications sent to an e-mail address (external ) of my choice, access to e-mail and voicemail over the phone, that's about it. So when I'm online I have my phone provider divert when busy to my mbox number and get phone messages notified by e-mail alerts. Can then download them and listen to them while still online.

Nortel Unified messaging.

[FreeLinux]

Nortel's CallPilot, their latest voicemail solution, offers this form of access as one of its many Unified Messaging modules. It works with most mail clients and can even be used via a browser. Voicemails appear as email messages in your inbox and when you open the message it plays the voicemail for you. I've even heard of text-to-speech transcribers, though I've yet to use such a service.

But, you stated that you don't want to spend the money for your own system and instead use the phone company's offering. This makes it all depend on your phone company. Many phone companies use Nortel's products and some actually offer this service. Sprint is the first to come to mind. Sprint uses Nortel for their switches and voice applications and does offer CallPilot Unified Messaging in many areas.

I'm quite sure that there are many other phone companies that offer similar services.

VOCP is a nice system

[bruceg]

From the freshmeat "About" section:

VOCP is a complete voice messaging solution, featuring voicemail boxes, email pagers and DTMF "command shells". Users can navigate the system using a touch-tone phone, leave and retrieve messages (by phone or through the web interface) and execute programs (optionally feeding the program numeric or even text input) on the host machine using the DTMF command shells.

Since it's mostly perl, I'm sure you could hack up something similar to what you are looking for.

VOCP Homepage [sourceforge.net]