answering machines
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An answering machine, answerphone or message machine, also known as telephone messaging machine (or TAM) in the UK and some
Commonwealth countries The Commonwealth of Nations is a voluntary association of 56 sovereign states. Most of them were British colonies or dependencies of those colonies. No one government in the Commonwealth exercises power over the others, as is the case in a p ...
, ansaphone or ansafone (from a
trade name A trade name, trading name, or business name, is a pseudonym used by companies that do not operate under their registered company name. The term for this type of alternative name is a "fictitious" business name. Registering the fictitious name w ...
), or telephone answering device (TAD), was used for answering telephones and recording callers' messages. If a phone rings a number of times predetermined by the phone's owner, and nobody is present to answer the incoming call, the answering machine will activate and play either a generic announcement or the voice of the person being called announcing that nobody is able to come to the phone at the moment. Following the announcement is a beeping tone which prompts the caller to record a message after the tone concludes. Unlike
voicemail A voicemail system (also known as voice message or voice bank) is a computer-based system that allows users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to ind ...
, which can be a centralized or networked system that covers, and mostly extends, similar functions, an answering machine is set up in the user's premises alongside—or incorporated within—the user's land-line telephone. Unlike operator messaging, the caller does not talk to a human. As
landline A landline (land line, land-line, main line, home phone, fixed-line, and wireline) is a telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber telephone line for transmission, as distinguished from a mobile cellular network, which uses ...
s become less important, due to the shift to cell phone technology, and as
unified communications Unified communications (UC) is a business and marketing concept describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice (including IP telephony), mobility features (including ...
mature, the
installed base Installed base (also install base, install duser base or just user base) is a measure of the number of units of a product or service that are actually in use, as opposed to market share, which only reflects sales over a particular period. Alth ...
of TADs is shrinking.


History

Most 20th century answering machines used
magnetic recording Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is ac ...
, which
Valdemar Poulsen Valdemar Poulsen (23 November 1869 – 23 July 1942) was a Danish engineer who made significant contributions to early radio technology. He developed a magnetic wire recorder called the telegraphone in 1898 and the first continuous wave rad ...
invented in 1898. The creation of the first practical automatic answering device for telephones, however, is in dispute. Starting in 1930, Clarence Hickman worked for
Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
, where he developed methods for magnetic recording and worked on the recognition of speech patterns and electromechanical switching systems. In 1934, he developed a tape-based answering machine which phone company
AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...
, as the owner of Bell Laboratories, kept under wraps for years for fear that an answering machine would result in fewer telephone calls. Many claim the answering machine was invented by William Muller in 1935, but it may already have been created in 1931 by William Schergens whose device used phonographic cylinders.
Ludwig Blattner Ludwig Blattner (1881 – 30 October 1935) was a German-born inventor, film producer, director and studio owner in the United Kingdom, and developer of one of the earliest magnetic sound recording devices. Career Ludwig Blattner, also kno ...
promoted a telephone answering machine in 1929 based on his Blattnerphone magnetic recording technology. In 1935, inventor Benjamin Thornton developed a machine to record voice messages from the caller. The device reportedly also was able to keep track of the time the recordings were made. Although many sources maintain that he invented it in 1935, Thornton had actually filed a patent in 1930 (Number 1831331) for this machine, which utilized a phonographic record as the recording medium. A commercial answering machine, the ''Tel-Magnet'', offered in the United States in 1949, played outgoing messages and recorded incoming messages on a magnetic wire. It was priced at $200 but was not a commercial success. In 1949, the first commercially successful answering machine was the ''Electronic Secretary'' created by inventor Joseph Zimmerman and businessman George W. Danner, who founded Electronic Secretary Industries in Wisconsin. The Electronic Secretary used the then state-of-the-art technology of a 45 rpm record player for announcements and a wire recorder for message capture and playback. Electronic Secretary Industries was purchased in 1957 by General Telephone and Electronics. Another commercially successful answering machine was the ''Ansafone'' created by inventor Dr.
Kazuo Hashimoto was a Japanese inventor who registered over 1,000 patents throughout the world, including patents for Caller-ID system and telephone answering machine. He patented his first telephone answering machine, the Ansa Fone, in Japan in 1954, followed ...
, who was employed by a company called ''Phonetel''. This company began selling the first answering machines in the US in 1960. Another early model known as the Code-a-Phone was introduced in 1966. Answering machines became more widely used after the restructuring of AT&T in 1984, which was when the machines became affordable and sales reached one million units per year in the US. The first post-breakup device went by the trade name of DuoPhone and was sold by Tandy (Radio Shack). This device and its successors were designed by Sava Jacobson, an electrical engineer with a private consulting business. While early answering machines used magnetic tape technology, most modern equipment uses solid state memory storage; some devices use a combination of both, with a solid-state circuit for the outgoing message and a cassette for the incoming messages. James P. Mitchell displayed a working prototype of a digital outgoing message with a taped incoming system at an Iowa State University VEISHEA engineering openhouse in April 1982. This system won a gold award from the Engineering department. In 1983,
Kazuo Hashimoto was a Japanese inventor who registered over 1,000 patents throughout the world, including patents for Caller-ID system and telephone answering machine. He patented his first telephone answering machine, the Ansa Fone, in Japan in 1954, followed ...
received a patent for a ''digital answering machine'' architecture with US Patent 4,616,110. The first digital answering machine brought to the market was AT&T's Model 1337 in 1990; an activity led by Trey Weaver. Mr. Hashimoto sued
AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...
but quickly dropped the suit because the AT&T architecture was significantly different from his patent.


Answering and ending calls

There are two possibilities for answering an incoming call: (1) waiting arbitrarily long for operator intervention, or (2) automatically answering after a specified number of rings in a certain state of the TAD (e.g. "toll saving" below). This is useful if the owner is screening calls and does not wish to speak with all callers. In any case after going ''
off-hook In telephony, on-hook and off-hook are two states of a communication circuit. On subscriber telephones the states are produced by placing the handset onto or off the hookswitch. Placing the circuit into the off-hook state is also called ''seizing th ...
'', the calling party should be informed about the call having been answered (in most cases this starts the charging), either by some remark of the operator, or by some greeting message of the TAD, or addressed to non-human callers (e.g. fax machines) by implementing an appropriate protocol over the landline. In some cases the
terminal equipment In telecommunication, the term terminal equipment has the following meanings: * Communications equipment at either end of a communications link, used to permit the stations involved to accomplish the mission for which the link was established. * I ...
answering a call just sends a slightly modified
ringback tone Ringing tone (audible ringing, also ringback tone) is a signaling tone in telecommunication that is heard by the originator of a telephone call while the destination terminal is alerting the receiving party. The tone is typically a repeated caden ...
to the caller, while processing the protocol. Similarly, the called equipment can end a call by going ''
on-hook In telephony, on-hook and off-hook are two states of a communication circuit. On subscriber telephones the states are produced by placing the handset onto or off the hookswitch. Placing the circuit into the off-hook state is also called ''seizing th ...
'' deliberately, because of some specific signalling, or because of some time out.


Pure voice operation

In case of voice-only environments any accepted call can be directly handed over to a TAD, which may be preemptively superseded by a human-operated handset, taking control by simply going off-hook itself, forcing the TAD (back) on-hook. Voice signals may simply be captured to and replayed from analogue media (mostly tapes), but later TADs shifted to digital storage, with all of its convenience for compression and handling, for both the greeting and for the recorded messages.


Greeting message

Most modern answering machines have a system for greeting. The owner may record a message that will be played back to the caller, or an automatic message will be played if the owner does not record one. This holds especially for the TADs with digitally stored greeting messages or for earlier machines (before the rise of
microcassette The Microcassette (often written generically as microcassette) is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969. It has the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a cassette roughly one quarter the size. By using t ...
s) with a special endless loop tape, separate from a second cassette, dedicated to recording. There have been answer-only devices with no recording capabilities, where the greeting message had to inform callers of a state of current unattainability, or e.g. about availability hours. In recording TADs the greeting usually contains an invitation to leave a message "after the beep". Greeting messages are partly considered as an art form, expressing the creativity and attractiveness of the operator of the TAD via remarkable wording and sound staging.


Recording messages

On a dual-cassette answerphone, there is an outgoing cassette, which after the specified number of rings plays a pre-recorded message to the caller. Once the message is complete, the outgoing cassette stops and the incoming cassette starts recording the caller's message, and then stops when the caller hangs up. Single-cassette answering machines contain the outgoing message at the beginning of the tape and incoming messages on the remaining space. They first play the announcement, then fast-forward to the next available space for recording, then record the caller's message. If there are many previous messages, fast-forwarding through them can cause a significant delay. This delay is taken care of by playing back a beep to the caller, when the TAD is ready to record. This beep is often referred to in the greeting message, requesting that the caller leave a message "after the beep". TADs with digital storage for the recorded messages do not show this delay, of course.


Remote control

A TAD may offer a remote control facility, whereby the answerphone owner can ring the home number and, by entering a code on the remote telephone's keypad, can listen to recorded messages, or delete them, even when away from home. Many devices offer a "toll-saver" function for this purpose. Thereby the machine increases the number of rings after which it answers the call (typically by two, resulting in four rings), if no unread messages are currently stored, but answers after the set number of rings (usually two) if there are unread messages. This allows the owner to find out whether there are messages waiting; if there are none, the owner can hang up the phone on the, e.g., third ring without incurring a call charge. Some machines also allow themselves to be remotely activated, if they have been switched off, by calling and letting the phone ring a certain large number of times (usually 10-15). Some service providers abandon calls already after a smaller number of rings, making remote activation impossible. In the early days of TADs a special transmitter for DTMF tones (dual-tone multi-frequency signalling) was regionally required for remote control, since the formerly employed
pulse dialling Pulse dialing is a signaling technology in telecommunications in which a direct current local loop circuit is interrupted according to a defined coding system for each signal transmitted, usually a digit. This lends the method the often used name ...
is not apt to convey appropriate signalling along an active connection, and the dual-tone multi-frequency signalling was implemented stepwise.


Combined operation

This refers to analogue sites, which support voice, fax and data transmission via landlines by adhering to specific protocols established by the
ITU-T The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three sectors (divisions or units) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Comm ...
. Any incoming call is not identifiable with respect to these properties in advance of going "off hook" by the terminal equipment. So after going off hook the calls must be switched to appropriate devices and only the voice-type is immediately accessible to a human, but perhaps, nevertheless should be routed to a TAD (e.g. after the caller has identified itself, or has been identified by a recognized
caller ID Caller identification (Caller ID) is a telephone service, available in analog and digital telephone systems, including voice over IP (VoIP), that transmits a caller's telephone number to the called party's telephone equipment when the call i ...
). Starting with the integration of faxing devices into computers via
Fax modem A fax modem enables a computer to transmit and receive documents as faxes on a telephone line. A fax modem is like a data modem but is designed to transmit and receive documents to and from a fax machine or another fax modem. Some, but not all, fa ...
s the automated answering of voice calls by a computer went live via specific software, like e.g. TalkWorks. These systems allowed for quite elaborate voice box systems, navigated via dual-tone multi-frequency signaling, allowing a computer on a (single) telephony line to sound like a professional telephony system with hierarchical fax and message boxes with an
automatic call distributor An automated call distribution system, commonly known as automatic call distributor (ACD), is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs direct calls based ...
, where a caller might deposit his messages, leave his faxes behind, might listen to specific messages, or start a fax-back service. Besides these solutions, mostly requiring a constantly running computer, since a wake-on-ring function then (~1995) started to take too much time to boot up an operating system, a few so-called ''selfmodems'' were available from e.g.
USRobotics U.S. Robotics Corporation, often called USR, is a company that produces USRobotics computer modems and related products. Its initial marketing was aimed at bulletin board systems, where its high-speed HST protocol made FidoNet transfers much fas ...
or
ELSA Technology Elsa Technology is a computer hardware company. It was founded in 1980 as ELSA Technology AG, a German company manufacturing video cards and other peripherals for Personal Computers. In 2002, the German company filed for bankruptcy while its Ta ...
: the ''Sportster MessagePlus'', the ''56K Message Modem External'', and the ''MicroLink Office''. These devices answered incoming calls by playing a welcome message while discriminating fax calls (CNG-tone at 1100 Hz) from voice calls, storing an incoming fax, or a voice message, respectively. A computer was only necessary afterwards to retrieve the faxes, or for storing the voice messages. In case of a full storage the devices changed their welcome message to another, prerecorded message, played upon answering an incoming call, possibly explaining that a message cannot be taken at the present time.


See also

*
Business telephone system A business telephone system is a multiline telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing systems ranging in technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX). A business telephone syst ...
*
Call-recording hardware Call recording hardware, or a telephone recorder, is hardware that can be used to record telephone conversations. Call recording hardware is most often used by law enforcement, lawyers, journalist, and call centers to record phone transaction w ...
*
Voicemail A voicemail system (also known as voice message or voice bank) is a computer-based system that allows users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to ind ...


References


External links


Related articles on a diagram
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Novelty Greetings for Telephone Answering MachinesSamples of common answering machine outgoing messages
{{Authority control Audiovisual introductions in 1949 Telephony