A funeral for voicemail - The Oatmeal

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I do love the oatmeal, but everything he does now is just for money. He’s probably just got a team of writers at this point.

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I get tons of spam calls and basically zero spam voicemail ‍️

Plus with most carriers being able to transcribe voicemails I don’t even need to listen to them.

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Private or unknown number? Assuming my phone is on. Please think.

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What makes you say that? The website seems way less ad heavy or monetized than most webcomic sites. I dont even see a link for a patreon or any sort of paywall. Theres one trailer for his netflix show but thats barely even self promotion, and doesnt come close to the shameless levels of nearly begging that a lot of webcomic artists do.

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Your phone will show the phone number of the person who left the voicemail. Please think.

Not every number is private or unknown. Please think.

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Are these people just raw dogging phones calls?

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I send all unknown calls to voice mail. I’ve had my carrier disable voice mail for my phone line.
My providers all use email or are ‘known’ by my phone. … I hope.

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So when the new specialty pharmacy phones you for details on where to send your prescription, you’re just gonna … not?

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Voicemail’s definitely not dead.

I can’t find any voicemail services that work the way I want them to though, so I started building my own using Twilio to handle the incoming phone call + ElevenLabs for text-to-speech + AssemblyAI for speech-to-text + Trestle Smart CNAM API for identifying the caller. I’ll open-source the code once it’s ready.

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I don’t answer the phone for unknown numbers. Super simple

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My pharmacies have always sent me a text notification that my prescription is ready for pick up. The only people calling my phone are scammers

Jolteon

Yep, if it’s important they’ll leave a message. Wait…

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If it’s important I’ll be expecting a phone call or know who is calling me. All that a voicemail does is tell spammers that they have a valid and active phone number that they should keep calling.

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Yeah. I’m very thankful that my work operates by the same expectations.

Anyone calling unscheduled is urgent enough that I probably shouldn’t waste time listening to the voicemail. Every other call is scheduled, anyway.

It leaves my work voicemail delightfully empty.

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“Hi honey, it’s me. I’m calling from the hospital, my phone was damaged in the crash. I know this area code is weird, we were only about halfway to Grandma’s when we were hit…”

“Unknown number? I’m not listening to that shit, I’m waiting for my wife to call when she gets to her parents house!”

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Seems awfully over complicated. Why not just use some twiml verbs like <say> and <gather>?

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I’m happy for you that you’ve never had to deal with length prior authorizations, specialty pharmacies, need for clarifications, notifications of delay …

I remember being on the phone with my pharmacist a few hours before my wedding - he called so something could get sorted out ASAP. Fortunately that one didn’t have to go to voicemail.

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Twilio’s TTS isn’t as good as ElevenLabs, and their transcription isn’t as good as AssemblyAI. AssemblyAI can pull key details out of the message (eg people’s names, company names, callback numbers, etc) and IIRC it’s quite a bit cheaper than Twilio’s transcription. AssemblyAI provide $50 free credit to try their service, which should last me a very long time assuming it doesn’t expire.

Plus now I can put “AI engineer” on my resume, lol. A lot of “AI” is all about gluing other people’s work together, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

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I had voicemail deactivated for decades. I’m not reachable? Call again later or write a message. Now that I’m older I had to reactivate it because contractors, pharmacy etc. expect and use it to send me information.

I hate voice messages in WhatsApp and the like but I can see the usage for others. My wife communicates with her friends this way. When you have to watch the kids you can send and listen to messages without having to look at your phone.

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Spammers never ever leave voicemails, that’s how I know a call was spam. If someone actually needs me, either I have their numbers already or they leave a voicemail