a phone answering system for Macintosh?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. Is there any software or even hardware that will let me setup an answering machine with touch-tone menus in a Macintosh? where would I start if I wanted to hook up more than one phone line to the Mac?

A. I'd like to setup a touch-tone menu system, the kind you get when you call a big corporation's 800 number "press 1 to speak to customer service, press 2 to order, etc". Can this be done on a AV Macintosh? Is there software (free or commercial) that will let me simplify do this? I'm willing to buy any NuBus cards that have a DSP chip on it to do this on a non-AV Macintosh. I'd like to set this up on my Mac at home and thus I can get rid of my answering machine and store all incoming/outgoing messages on the hard disk. One, alternately called "TFLX" and "TeleFlex" is a hardware-software combination. Worked okay (this was back in Mac Plus days, I have no idea whether it's still available or compatible with System 7, new Mac hardware, etc. I last saw an advertizement for it perhaps three years ago), but it was a pain to get configured. I don't really have a very clear recollection of it, beyond that. Oh, it was also pretty expensive, ~$2000, at the time, as I recall. Number two was the Cypress PhonePro. Again, it's a hardware-and-software combination. The hardware isn't a modem, just a box that can do dtmf and voice. The problem here was that the software is incredibly slow and buggy. You put together a flow-chart out of little action-module icons, and connect them. Kind of like Body Electric on an SGI. Except that works. :-) The problem was that many, many seconds would go by between trigger actions and the responses that were supposed to follow. Mostly due to bad handling of sound and data records... i.e. the phone would ring, the software would know it was supposed to answer on the third ring, and know that it had to play fifteen seconds of high-resolution sound... Does it pre-load the sound? Nope. Ring... Ring... Ring... Off-hook... Wait while the software figures out what sound to play... Wait while it loads the file from disk... Wiat while it decompresses the file... Ah! And here's our sound. If we haven't already hung up, hearing dead silence on the line for seven to fifteen seconds. I was able to make a simple answering machine thing work by doing an ugly hack where the incoming CID/ANI data (or, more often, the lack of it) triggered a sound, and then a different script answered the phone on like the fourth ring. Costs ~$1200. High Tide Software, in Berkeley (no, I'm not affiliated...) has some software called "Watermark Voicemail" which seems to work pretty well, though. Sounds very smooth, seems to be reliable, and it's a lot cheaper... A couple hundred dollars, I think. Works with one model each of Zoom and Zyxel modems, but they aren't bundled. Cheap modems, though, also in the $200 range. The only two drawbacks I could see to this package were that one of the two modems (I can't remember which, but I thinkthe Zoom) couldn't detect incoming DTMF until after a sound was finished playing, so you had to insert pauses to listen. The other modem didn't have that problem, though. The other possible drawback (it depends what you're going to use it for... Could be an advantage) is that it doesn't do sound-files on the Mac. The modems store the sounds internally. What that means is that you can't convert from voicemail to sound-enclosure-in-email and back again. Makes everything else a lot faster and smoother, though, and means you don't need a huge hard drive to store all the sound files on. They are a combination of software that allows you to create the telephony application and hardware that allows you to interface with the PSTN. The software is (in both cases) an iconic programming language. This means you drag and drop icons onto the screen to create the call flows. Icons include things like menus, branching functions, and database lookups. This makes it easy to get started, but can lead to difficulties if you want a behavior that the system doesn't explicitly support. The hardware part of the package is an external box that does DTMF decoding, D/A conversion, and some line control. I think both packages also have some support for fax functions, but may be mistaken on this.

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