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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, often referred to as the British Commonwealth or simply the Commonwealth, is an international association of 56 member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire from which i ...
, 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 fictitious business name. Registering the fictitious name with ...
), or telephone answering device (TAD), is used for answering telephone calls and recording callers' messages. When a telephone rings a set number of times predetermined by the call's recipient the answering machine will activate and play either a generic announcement or a customized greeting created by the recipient. Unlike
voicemail A voicemail system (also known as voice message or voice bank) is a computer-based system that allows callers to leave a recorded message when the recipient has been unable (or unwilling) to answer the phone. Calls may be directed to voicemail m ...
, an answering machine is placed at the user's premises alongside—or incorporated within—the user's landline telephone, and unlike operator messaging, the caller does not talk to a human. As
landline A landline is a physical telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber from the subscriber's premises to the network, allowing multiple phones to operate simultaneously on the same phone number. It is also referred to as plain old ...
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 ...
evolve, the
installed base Installed base of a product is the number of units that are currently in use by customers. It provides a measurement of a company's existing customer base and the extent of their investment in a particular product or technology. In contrast to m ...
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 ...
, which
Valdemar Poulsen Valdemar Poulsen (23 November 1869 – 23 July 1942) was a Danish engineer who developed a magnetic wire recorder called the telegraphone in 1898. He also made significant contributions to early radio technology, including the first continuous w ...
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, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...
, 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., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...
, 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. Schergens' device is featured in Behind the Mask (1932 film). Ludwig Blattner 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 Wire recording, also known as magnetic wire recording, was the first magnetic recording technology, an analog type of audio storage. It recorded sound signals on a thin steel wire using varying levels of magnetization. The first crude magne ...
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 a Caller-ID system and telephone answering machines. He filed for his first telephone answering machine patent, what would become the Ansa F ...
, 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 Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic ...
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 a Caller-ID system and telephone answering machines. He filed for his first telephone answering machine patent, what would become the Ansa F ...
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., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...
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 ...
'', 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 telecommunications, 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. * ...
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 cade ...
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 ...
'' 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 ...
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".


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. The incoming cassette remains stopped at the end of the last recorded message, so it is ready to start recording another message, from another call, immediately on demand. However, the incoming message cassette must be rewound before the stored messages can be played back; typically there is a single button to play messages which when pressed causes the machine to automatically first rewind the incoming message cassette and then start playback. Some machines will keep track of the position of the end of the last message that has already been played back and only rewind to that point in order to only play back new messages, unless the user explicitly rewinds the tape further and then starts playback. 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 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 International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three Sectors (branches) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating Standardization, standards fo ...
. 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 is ...
). Starting with the integration of faxing devices into computers via Fax modems the automated answering of voice calls by a computer went live via specific software, such as TalkWorks. These systems allowed for quite elaborate voice box systems, navigated via
dual-tone multi-frequency signaling Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signaling is a telecommunication signaling system using the voice-frequency band over telephone lines between telephone equipment and other communications devices and Automatic telephone exchange, switching center ...
, 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 or automatic call dispatcher (ACD), is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organiz ...
, 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, which primarily required a constantly running computer since a wake-on-ring function then (~1995) would take increasingly longer times to boot up an operating system, a few so-called ''selfmodems'' were available from such companies as
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 fast ...
or
ELSA Technology Elsa Technology is a computer hardware company. It was founded in 1980 as ELSA Technology AG, a Germany, German company manufacturing video cards and other peripherals for Personal Computers. In 2002, the German company filed for bankruptcy whil ...
: 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 *
Call-recording hardware 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 with ...
*
Voicemail A voicemail system (also known as voice message or voice bank) is a computer-based system that allows callers to leave a recorded message when the recipient has been unable (or unwilling) to answer the phone. Calls may be directed to voicemail m ...


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