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Voicemail

A voicemail system (also known as voice message or voice bank) is a computer-based system that allows people to leave a recorded message when the recipient is unable to answer the phone. The caller is prompted to leave a message and the recipient can retrieve said message at a later time.

For other uses, see Voicemail (disambiguation).

Voicemail can be used for personal calls and more complex systems exist for companies and services to handle customer requests. The term is also used more broadly to denote any system of conveying stored telecommunications voice messages, including using an answering machine.

International Voicemail Association[edit]

In 1987, voicemail service providers in the US and Europe joined to form the Voice Mail Association of Europe (VMA) with René Beusch, Radio-Suisse and Paul Finnigan, Finnigan USA[18] serving as VMA Chairman and President respectively. The first VMA meeting was held in Stockholm Huddinge by Voicemail Svenska AB in 1987, organized by its founder Lars Olof Kanngard. The tech team in Voicemail Svenska AB was granted the right to port the Voicemail from PDP systems to their own PC-board solution, which become known as the MiniVoice, later become ESSELTE VOICE AB. The VMA invited service providers, vendors and consultants to attend semi-annual conferences that included presentations, discussions and reporting of experiences. VMA membership was eventually expanded to include representatives from telecommunication organizations worldwide and became "The International Voice-mail Association". By the late 1980s, the Bell Operating companies, Tigon and other independent service providers in the US had joined the VMA. In 1992, VMA members conducted an "Information Week Tour of the U.S.", sharing ideas with major telecom operators. VMA working groups promoted collaboration and adoption of industry standards to the ITU and CCITT and at the 1999 CCITT conference in Geneva, Switzerland, demonstrated worldwide exchange of messages between the major voicemail vendors' platforms using the VPIM networking standard. Beusch and Finnigan led the VMA until 1998 and 1999 respectively and the organization continues to serve the voice services industry today.[19]

Public telephone services[edit]

In the US, the Bell Operating Companies and their cellular divisions had been prohibited by the FCC from offering voicemail and other enhanced services such as paging and telephone answering services (no such prohibition existed in foreign countries). A ruling by Judge Harold H. Greene on March 7, 1988, removed this barrier and allowed the BOCs to offer voicemail service, however, they were not allowed to design or manufacture equipment used to provide voicemail services.


The opportunity created by the Greene decision, plus Voicemail International's abandonment of its market lead for carrier-grade systems, created a new opportunity for competing manufacturers and those who had been focusing on the corporate market. Unisys, Boston Technology, and Comverse Technology were quick to address the BOC and PTT marketplace. Octel, who had high capacity systems in use internally by all seven Regional Bell Operating companies, launched a new generation of its large system specifically designed for carriers and was compliant with "NEBS standards", the tight standard required by phone companies for any equipment located in their central offices.

Instant messaging in voice[edit]

By the year 2000, voicemail had become a ubiquitous feature on phone systems serving companies, cellular and residential subscribers. Cellular and residential voicemail continue today in their previous form, primarily simple telephone answering. Email became the prevalent messaging system, email servers and software became quite reliable, and virtually all office workers were equipped with multimedia desktop PCs.


The increase in wireless mobility, originally through cellular services and today through IP-based Wi-Fi, was also a driver for messaging convergence with mobile telephony. Today, it is not only fostering the use of speech user interfaces for message management, but increasing the demand for retrieval of voice messages integrated with email. It also enables people to reply to both voice and email messages in voice rather than text. New services, such as GotVoice, SpinVox and YouMail, are helping to blur the boundaries between voicemail and text by delivering voicemails to mobile phones as SMS text messages.


The next development in messaging was in making text messaging real-time, rather than just asynchronous store-and-forward delivery into a mailbox. Although in the 1980s Minitel in France was extremely popular and Teletext was widely used in the US, instant messaging on the Internet began with the ICQ application developed in 1996 as a public Internet-based free text "chat" service for consumers, but soon was being used by business people as well. It introduced the concept of Internet Protocol "presence management" or being able to detect device connectivity to the Internet and contact recipient "availability" status to exchange real-time messages, as well as personalized "Buddy list" directories to allow only people you knew to find out your status and initiate a real-time text messaging exchange with you. Presence and Instant Messaging has since evolved into more than short text messages, but now can include the exchange of data files (documents, pictures) and the escalation of the contact into a voice conversational connection.

Benefits[edit]

Voicemail's introduction enabled people to leave lengthy, secure and detailed messages in natural voice, working hand-in-hand with corporate phone systems. The adoption of voicemail in corporations improved the flow of communications and saved huge amounts of money. GE, one of the pioneer adopters of voicemail in all of its offices around the world, claimed that voicemail saved, on average, over US$1,100 per year per employee. Needless to say, the ability to tell someone something without talking to them, can be a powerful reason to choose voicemail for delivery of a particular message.

CDMA

IP telephony

Visual voicemail

"A Reactive Telephone Message Network for the Office of the Future", Business Communications Review, July-Aug 1980; "Voice Mail Arrives in the Office", Business Week, June 9, 1980, p. 81.

"The Case for Voice Mail: Confirmed." GE Corporate Telecommunications publication, May 1989, Constance C. Kelly, editor.

"IBM Audio Distribution System", IBM publication GX60-0075-0

"Toward Competitive Provision of Public Record Message Services", Experimental Technology Incentives Program, National Bureau of Standards, Washington, DC. Publication NBX-GCR-ETIP-81-97 October, 1991.

"Speech Filing System Reference Manual", 1975, by J. W. Schoonard and S. J. Boies, IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, 10598.

"How to Shoulder Aside the Titans", Gene Bylinsky, Fortune, May 18, 1992; "Octel Keeps Bringing You Voice Mail", Global Telecoms Business (UK), February/March 1996, pp. 22–24

"Human Factors Challenges In Creating A Principal Support Office System: The Speech Filing System Approach", by John D. Gould and Stephen J. Boies, IBM Tomas J. Watson Research Center, as quoted in a paper presented to the Association for Computing Machinery. See ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol. 1, No. 4, October 1983, pp. 273–298.

"IBM Audio Distribution System Subscriber's Guide" and "IBM Audio Distribution System, Administrator's Guide". IBM Publications SC34-0400-3 and SC34-0400-1

"Voice Store and Forward for the Automated Office", a presentation by Lawrence E. Bergeron, Dennis B. Howell and Dean Osborne, Wang Laboratories, Inc., Lowell, Mass., transcribed in "Computer Controlled Voice Message Systems and the Office of the Future", Professional Program Session Record (10), Wescon/81, Electronic Show and Convention, September 15–17 September 1981, section 2, pp. 1–8.

"Octel Emerges as Rising Star in Voice Messaging Systems", Peninsula Times Tribune, November 7, 1988, page C-1; "Investors Waking Up to Octel's Leadership", Investor's Daily, February 17, 1989; "Octel's Stock Gamble Has Paid Off", USA Today, February 24, 1989, page 3B.

"All Your Messages in One Place", Michael H. Martin, Fortune, May 12, 1997, p. 172.

"Toward Competitive Provision of Public Record Message Services", ETIP (Experimental Technology Incentives Program), National Bureau of Standards, Washington, DC, October, 1981; "domestic Public Message Services", FCC publication 71FCC 2d 471; "Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1981" (FCC Computer Inquiry II), Docket 20828, December 30, 1980; "Denial of AT&T Petition for Waiver of Section 64.702 of the Commission Rules and Regulations", October 7, 1981, Federal Communications Reports 88FCC 2d.

United States of America (Plaintiff) v. Western Electric Company, Inc., et al. (Defendants). Civil action no. 82–0192, Section VII pp. 51–65: "The judge on review considers the threat to possible competition in the voice-mail and storage business to be less real than the opportunities lost to the public welfare by these services not being broadly available. Hence, the BOCs should be able to provide voice-mail."

GSM (Global System for Mobile Carriers) is one of the various cellular technologies which include TDMA, CDMA, iDEN and others. GSM is currently the technology used by Cingular in the US and is the prevalent technology in over 100 countries around the world.

Investor's Business Daily, February 1, 1996. "Octel's Robert Cohn: CEO of Voice-Messaging Firm Puts Premium on Speed", by Kathleen Doler.

"Lucent Is Set to Buy Leader in Voice Mail", Seth Schiesel, The New York Times, July 18, 1997, Page C1.