Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 5 Apr 91 16:25:48 GMT From: "David E. Bernholdt" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Mystery Solved (was: Strange Phone Calls) Message-ID: Organization: Quantum Theory Project, Univ. of Florida Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 269, Message 2 of 11 Lines: 59 In article I wrote: > I received a rather strange series of phone calls at my home last > night. I answered the phone and a synthesized female voice says > "Please hold the line, I have a call for this number." After a couple more of these calls the next day, I finally found out what it was. A call arrived at roughly the interval it had been retrying at from the holder of my student loan -- the Illinois Student Assistance Commission. After discussing the matter of my continued student deferrment, I asked if they used such a computerized system as had been bugging me. They do. The system is called Voicelink, and is produced by a company of the same name in Seattle, WA. A computer dials the phone number in question and listens for an answer. If an answering machine answers (recognized by a long speech, I imagine), it leaves a computerized message saying that the ISAC is trying to reach you and will call back. If a human answers it connects you immediately to a human to take the call (this transfer was unnoticable to me). The place I got caught is that there were no humans available to take the call, so the computer tried for a little while to find one, then apologized and hung up. All in all, there are a bunch of humans takining a bunch of automatically dialed calls at the same time. The obvious utility of this system for the _caller_ is that human time is expended only in talking to a human. Several people who responded to my original posting say that this is also being used in telemarketing. Someone mentioned that you can also employ a human to dial the numbers and connect in the computer if there are (legal) problems with computer-dialed calls. (Boy, what a job!) The person managing VoiceLink for the ISAC said that her Visa company uses such a system as well. She said she appreciates it. Apparently she only gets calls when she's away, so there is a message on the answering machine. She claimed that situations like mine, where no human was available to take the call were quite rare (though it happened to me five times in two days). I suggested that the computer should identify the call as being from the ISAC in such situations, and she promised that she would talk to the vendor to see if it could be done. She reacted quite calmly when I said that I would hang up on future calls which didn't identify the caller -- her only concern was to be sure that I _would_ speak to a human if everything worked as it was intended to. Of course now that I know who the caller (probably) is when it happens again, things are somewhat less bothersome. I must say that it was rather disconcerting, having never met such a system before -- and everyone has to have a first experience with it _sometime_. David Bernholdt bernhold@qtp.ufl.edu Quantum Theory Project bernhold@ufpine.bitnet University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611 904/392 6365