Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!watvlsi!watale!daemon
From: daemon@watale.waterloo.edu (Watale's Little Helper)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: Reading phone tones by computer
Message-ID: <3022@watale.waterloo.edu>
Date: 25 Nov 88 18:35:03 GMT
References: <195@tcville.HAC.COM> <180@shuxd.UUCP>
Reply-To: kjohnson@surya.waterloo.edu (Kevin Johnson)
Distribution: na
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 28

In article <180@shuxd.UUCP> starr@shuxd.UUCP (Michael L. Starr) writes:
>In article <195@tcville.HAC.COM> ferris@tcville.HAC.COM () writes:
>>    I am looking for a device that will interface a phone line to a computer
>>that will allow the computer to read the tones a caller presses and be able
>>to send a digitized or computer generated voice in response to what
>>is pressed.
>>    I suppose that could be as simple as feeding the lines into a
>>tone recognizer which would get turned into ASCII or hex and sent on the
>>bus.  Voice generation is easy to find, but how about one that can be sent on
>>a phone line.  Preferably this would be a card that could plug into an IBM PC.

About six months ago I received information on a product that does exactly what
you want.  I'm not sure where the company was situated but i do recall that the
name of the product was "Bigmouth".  It acted as an answering machine that would
answer the phone and wait for the user to enter a four digit tone on a touch    tone phone.  Any number of things could then be accomplished.  The caller
could leave messages in different 'voice mail' boxes where up to 99 users could
call in and get private messages.  The caller could activate a message that
would be played back to them over the phone etc.
The cost of the entire package was about $500 and plugged in to an IBM pc
compatible with at least 512K and a hard drive.
I was very interested in this and called the company, they plugged me in to
and actual PC using their machine and let me use it over the phone.... i was
extremely impressed with the performance.   

P.S.  I'm fairly sure i have saved the literature for the machine... i'll see
      if i can dig it up for you.
					-Kevin