[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