[pm215]

For a long time in the dialup era my "answering machine" was a US Robotics voice-capable modem attached to my home Linux PC, with some scripts to make it pick up after N rings, play a message, record whatever the caller said, and then email me the resulting sound file. The Linux support for it included DTMF tone recognition, so I added in a quick hack so that if I sent it the right pin code during the "please leave a message" part it would wait for me to hang up and then dial my ISP, so I could ssh in to it from wherever I was...

[EvanAnderson]

I wrote some stuff in Turbo Pascal for DOS to do something like this (albeit it didn't email files-- it just dumped them into a directory on the disk). My parents had two phone lines so making test calls from a real phone was easy. I just had to go around the house and turn off the ringers on all the phones so I wouldn't wake anybody doing test calls in the wee morning hours.

I didn't understand the sample format so all my playback was via the phone handset. I was in over my head, at that time, when it came to grokking audio codecs.

My grand vision was to make some kind of voice-based bulletin board system.

[glasss]

A voice based BBS could probably trace some kind of cultural or technical lineage to TikTok today, interesting to think about.

[ssl-3]

There were some things that came kind-of close.

TellMe was one: Call the number, ask it questions, get answers. Part of my normal commute for a time involved calling TellMe to get the weather for the day on a Nokia dumb phone once I got settled into the drive.

Goog411 was another one. You could call Google, ask it questions, and get summaries of search results along with answers for a distinct questions (a lot like LLMs do today). I distinctly recall standing in the supermarket looking at large and inexpensive hunk of meat that was labelled as a "Boston Butt Roast", and calling Goog411 to find some common uses for it. (It did give me confidence to buy it, and we did cook it and eat it. It was lovely.)

These things worked well for that brief moment in time when cellular calling minutes were either plentiful or unlimited, when smartphones didn't commonly exist, and when mobile data was ludicrously expensive.

[cbluth]

Goog411 had sms and travel directions, as tap into something like google maps. I used it to travel several interstate trips back in the day

[ynac]

Similar setup for me as well. Later I copied the rig for a long distance and out-of-country call back system to save money. Loved that modem...

[jcims]

I was going to use that to start a private voicemail company in my little rural town. Had the name and everything ready to go (mailvox!) but I was too broke to afford the second phone line xD.

Plus in retrospect I'm sure it would have been used almost exclusively for illicit purposes. But that wasn't really something I had thought of back then.

[glasss]

It's funny to think that not that long ago businesses would pay a premium for that feature set from their voice service provider. Maybe not the SSH part lol, but I worked with plenty of small and medium businesses in my career that paid for a voicemail to email service.