Visual Voicemail

[Jeremy Nikolai]

It's not up to the carrier to support it, if you're not depending on
the carrier's voicemail system.  This is an idea I'd been thinking about for
a while, and was the first thing I thought of when OpenMoko was
announced - since it takes access to the gsm module to be possible.

Disable voicemail w/ your carrier (if possible; otherwise just answer
before it kicks in).  Write a voicemail app for the phone that answers
the call after a few rings, plays a message, records response to local
memory.  Assuming we've got access to the caller ID data, that should
be everything needed to write a visual playback app.

Plus, you can do fun things like throwing in a simple turing test
("dial 7 if you're human", before even ringing/passing to voicemail),
or handling incoming numbers differently (ring immediately on
recognized numbers, send others straight to voicemail).

Pitfalls:
You lose the immediate ability to remotely access voicemail; the
functionality could easily be recreated in the phone, but your phone
needs to be on somewhere for it to work.  The whole thing would also
fail if you're phone's off or out of range - though carrier
voicemail's always there to fall back on.

For me, though, I can easily live with these limitations - I never use
remote access (I've always got my phone on me), and I can't remember
the last time I've looked at my phone and seen less than 4 bars.

As soon as 2/11 hits, this'll be my first goal.


On 1/19/07, David Schlesinger <david.schlesinger at palmsource.com> wrote:
>
>  Visual voicemail requires back-end support from the carrier.
>
>
>  On 1/19/07 5:34 PM, "Gervais Mulongoy" <gervais.mulongoy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> It is my understanding that Visual Voicemail is a feature that is purely
> iPhone + Cingular.
>
>  On 1/19/07, Christopher Ellison < cjellison at ucdavis.edu
> <mailto:cjellison at ucdavis.edu> > wrote:
>
> Might we be able to have visual voicemail, as advertised with the
>  iPhone...or is this service provider dependent?
>
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