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History of Voicemail
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Voicemail systems are often associated with office telephone systems or PBXs. They may also be associated with public telephone network services such as residential phones or cellular phones. Mobile phones generally have voicemail as a standard network feature. The most modern implementations of voicemail support fax delivery to personal voice mailboxes and retrieval via printers, are integrated into e-mail systems for shared directories and shared message storage (also called Unified Messaging), and use touch tone voice user interfaces (VUI), speech technologies, and/or visual, screen-based graphical user interfaces (GUI) user interfaces.
The need for voicemail
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the cost of making a phone call decreased and more business communication was done by phone. As corporations grew and labor rates increased, the ratio of secretaries to employees decreased. With multiple time zones, fewer secretaries and more communication by phone, real-time phone communications were hampered by callers being unable to reach people. Some early studies showed that only 1 in 4 phone calls resulted in a completed call and half the calls were one-way in nature (that is, they did not require a conversation). This happened because people were either not at work (due to time zone differences, being away on business, etc.), or if they were at work, they were on the phone, away from their desks in meetings, on breaks, etc. This bottleneck hindered the effectiveness of business activities and decreased both individual and group productivity. It wasted the people’s time and created delays in resolving time-critical issues.
First solutions did not work
Neither email messaging nor cellular phones were used much at that time. The initial solution to the phone communication problem was the “message center.” A message center or “message desk” was a centralized, manual answering service inside a company manned by a few people answering everyone’s phones. Extensions that were busy or rang “no answer” would forward to the message center onto a device called a “call director”. The call director had a button for each extension in the company which would flash when that person’s extension forwarded to the message center. A little label next to the button told the operator whose extension it was.
Operators were busy, and sometimes huge volumes of calls would come in at the same time, often with several peak periods (such as lunch time). This left message attendants with little time to take each message accurately, plus they weren’t familiar with people’s names or how to spell or pronounce them. Messages were written on pink slips and distributed by the internal mail system. Messages often arrived at people’s desks after lengthy delays, contained little content (other than the caller’s name and number) and were often inaccurate, with misspelled names and wrong phone numbers.
Tape-based telephone answering machines had come into the residential telephone market, but weren’t used much in the corporate environment due to physical limitations of the technology:
- one answering machine was needed for each telephone
- messages couldn’t be recorded if the user was on his phone
- messages had to be retrieved in sequential order
- messages couldn’t be retrieved remotely (until years later), selectively discarded, saved, or forwarded to others
Manufacturers of PBXs (private branch exchanges — the name for corporate phone systems) introduced proprietary digital phone sets in order to increase the functionality and value of the PBX. These phone sets were, by design, electronically incompatible with answering machines.
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