How do I set up a digital voicemail system that could be converted to mp3's?

Asked by mailmodel (7

) January 5th, 2013

I’m trying to collect a wide berth of voicemail audio samples for a multimedia project, but my limited technology experience is proving to be a hurdle.

My goal is to set up a phone line or voicemail system where folks could record or forward their voice messages and I would have the ability to convert them to mp3s.

Ideally, the voicemail system would function as follows:
– I would have a phone number that I could publicly distribute via social networks, flyers, word of mouth, etc. (Without being tied to my existing cell phone service or me as an individual)
– When folks call or forward their messages they would hear a quick disclaimer regarding submission anonymity.
– At my leisure I would be able listen to the messages left to delete the creepy ones, and convert the interesting ones to mp3s.

Is this possible? If so, dear internet, please tell me how.

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2 Answers

Google Voice. It meets all of your criteria. You don’t even need to convert to mp3 – it’s already in mp3 format.

tom_g (16638

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I agree with @tom_g – what you are asking is already done commercially by any number of services. It’s not that groundbreaking or special. What you’re doing, essentially, is designing a VOIP (or for that matter, it could be POTS) system that detects a ring (which is a voltage change), playing an outgoing message, supplying a tone, and opening up a port for an incoming digital audio stream.

Once you have captured the incoming audio (the message), it is trivial to encode that in MP3 or OGG or any other audio format.

So it not only possible, but it is done a thousand times every day. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were SDKs that do 95% of the heavy lifting for you.

If you really want to do something useful and cool, you ought to develop the same idea but with VIDEO, and encode the stream as an AVI or similar, and have those automatically play back on screen.

elbanditoroso (33158

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