Voicemail
Voicemail can be used for personal calls and more complex systems exist for companies and services to handle customer requests.
Edison applied for a US patent in December 1877 and shortly thereafter demonstrated the machine to publishers, the US Congress and President Rutherford B. Hayes.
In an article outlining his own ideas of the future usefulness of his machine Edison's list began with "Letter writing, and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer."
This set the stage for a creation of a broad spectrum of computer based Central Office and Customer Premises Equipment that would eventually support enhanced voice solutions such as voicemail, audiotex, interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition solutions that began emerging in the 1980s.
[7] The true first inventor[citation needed] of voicemail, patent number 4,124,773 (Audio Storage and Distribution System), is Robin Elkins.
A similar suit brought byVDI Technologies against the Kolodny and Hughes patent claiming prior art was dismissed by the US District Court in New Hampshire on December 19, 1991.
The first[citation needed] voice-messaging application, the Speech Filing System, was developed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1973 under the leadership of Stephen Boies.
ADS used the human voice and the fixed-line touch-tone telephones that predated computer screens and mobile phones.
In 1979, a company was founded in Texas by Gordon Matthews called ECS Communications (the name was later changed to VMX, for Voice Message exchange).
[17] About a year later, VRI introduced one of the first "successful" IVR applications that utilized voice recognition (rather than touch tone) to capture caller responses.
Voice recognition technology had great difficulty with regional and ethnic differences and nuances which resulted in a high incidence of error.
VRI developed proprietary techniques that measured user response times and used the data to make real-time changes to the application's dialog with the caller.
VRI found that the confidence level of a "suspect" caller response could be increased by asking "Did you say (Chicago), Yes or No", a standard question heard in order taking or reservation making IVR applications today.
These companies aimed to use the PC as an inexpensive hardware platform for hosting add-in boards and software providing voice mail functionality for small businesses that wanted something more sophisticated than an answering machine but could not afford pricey conventional voice mail solutions.
The first VMA meeting was held in Stockholm Huddinge by Voicemail Svenska AB in 1987, organized by its founder Lars Olof Kanngard.
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".
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.
Unified Messaging had been invented by Roberta Cohen, Kenneth Huber and Deborah Mill at AT&T Bell Labs.
Virtual Telephony, developed by Octel, used voicemail to provide phone service rapidly in emerging countries without wiring for telephones.
The economies of emerging countries were held back partly because people could not communicate beyond the area where they could walk or ride a bicycle.
Cellular phones were not an option at the time because they were extremely expensive (thousands of dollars per handset) and the infrastructure to install cell sites was also costly.
By the year 2000, voicemail had become a ubiquitous feature on phone systems serving companies, cellular and residential subscribers.
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.
The corporate IP telephony-based voicemail customer premises equipment market is served by several vendors including Avaya, Cisco systems, Adomo, Interactive Intelligence, Nortel, Mitel, 3Com, and AVST.
[22] Their marketing strategy will have to address the need to support a variety of legacy PBXs as well as new Voice over IP as enterprises migrate towards converging IP-based telecommunications.
VoIP telephony enables centralized, shared servers, with remote administration and usage management for corporate (enterprise) customers.
In the past, carriers lost this business because it was far too expensive and inflexible to have remote managed facilities by the phone company.
Because of the convergence of wired and wireless communications, such services may also include support of a variety of multi-modal handheld and desktop end user devices.
Voicemail's introduction enabled people to leave lengthy, secure and detailed messages in natural voice, working hand-in-hand with corporate phone systems.
