Visual Voicemail App Functionality

Hi,

Does anyone know if the iPhone SDK provides official support for interacting with the user's voicemail server?

Could the iPhone SDK be used to replicate Apple's visual voicemail app?

If there isn't official support - would this type of functionality be feasible in any way on an app developed with the SDK? (i.e. downloading a user's voicemail messages and or updating their voicemail greeting)

Any info on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

- dshap

 

At the time I was building an "away message for voicemail" system. Heading to the gym? Press 1 button on your cell phone phone and say "I'm at the gym, will be back around 7" and that instantly replaces your generic, worthless "Hello I'm not here right now" greeting. Wanna get fancy? Set an expiration time so at 7 it automatically reverts back without you having to do anything.

Obviously using my carrier's voicemail greeting system was not an option, so I built a "voicemail greeting server" with Asterisk. I entered some GSM code on my phone to set it to forward missed calls to my Asterisk box instead of AT&T. My server would then play the custom/temporary greeting to the caller, record their voicemail message, and afterward place an outgoing call to AT&T's backdoor voicemail number and re-play the message to leave it in the callee's mailbox. I needed RDNIS to get the caller ID that the caller was trying to reach.

Got it working pretty well for me but I ran into issues when trying to let other people use it:

• On AT&T, people have different voicemail backdoor numbers - how do you automatically determine someone's voicemail backdoor number so you can deliver their voicemails?
  
• How do you do this with other carriers like Verizon, where there seemingly is no voicemail backdoor number? Or maybe there is but I just couldn't find any of them. The strange thing about this one, which is a mystery to me till this day, is that there was a now-closed service called "GotVoice" that did something called "silent voicemail delivery", and they claimed they could deliver a voicemail to you by "navigating the backend systems of mobile carriers". I have no idea how they did it, but many of my friends and I tried it, and it worked for multiple carriers. Press a button on their website and in a few minutes you have a voicemail from them without your phone ever ringing.

If anyone has any thoughts/insight on the above, I'd love to hear it!