Hello all
I was just thinking how neat it would be if I could have my computer act as an answering machine. Ideally:
1) As a call came in, the computer would get its caller-id information.
2) Using Text-to-Speech, the computer would read off a message
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/speech/
3) It would potentially provide a menu of options, and react to inputs from touch-tone phones.
4) It would record messages and encode them as MP3 files, and (optionally) place them on one's iDisk, so they could be retrieved from afar
5) the messages would be processed by the Speech recognition software, and a transcript emailed to one's email account. (w/ mp3 attached?)
6) certain tasks could be set up to be accessed by a PIN-authenticated menu
7) sending SMS alerts as to a message would be fairly straight-forward
8) playing back messages over the phone would take no more effort than the initial Text-to-Speech reading (would be inside authenticated menu)
9) arbitrary numbers of voice mail boxes, special messages for certain phone numbers, etc would all seem to be pretty easy to set up.
So obviously no one program or script that is currently available can do all of this. Can people vet this for things that a Mac simply cannot do?
The big question of course is, can one play sound to the phone line via a modem? How can one do so?
-RS
I was just thinking how neat it would be if I could have my computer act as an answering machine. Ideally:
1) As a call came in, the computer would get its caller-id information.
2) Using Text-to-Speech, the computer would read off a message
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/speech/
3) It would potentially provide a menu of options, and react to inputs from touch-tone phones.
4) It would record messages and encode them as MP3 files, and (optionally) place them on one's iDisk, so they could be retrieved from afar
5) the messages would be processed by the Speech recognition software, and a transcript emailed to one's email account. (w/ mp3 attached?)
6) certain tasks could be set up to be accessed by a PIN-authenticated menu
7) sending SMS alerts as to a message would be fairly straight-forward
8) playing back messages over the phone would take no more effort than the initial Text-to-Speech reading (would be inside authenticated menu)
9) arbitrary numbers of voice mail boxes, special messages for certain phone numbers, etc would all seem to be pretty easy to set up.
So obviously no one program or script that is currently available can do all of this. Can people vet this for things that a Mac simply cannot do?
The big question of course is, can one play sound to the phone line via a modem? How can one do so?
-RS
