Voicemail (or voice mail, voice-mail, vmail or VMS, sometimes called messagebank) is a centralized system of managing telephone messages for a large group of people.

Features

In its simplest form it mimics the functions of an answering machine, uses a standard telephone handset for the user interface, and uses a centralized, computerized system rather than equipment at the individual telephone. Voicemail systems are much more sophisticated than answering machines in that they can:

• answer many phones at the same time
• store incoming voice messages in personalized mailboxes associated with the user's phone number
• enable users to forward received messages to another voice mailbox
• send messages to one or more other user voice mailboxes
• add a voice introduction to a forwarded message
• store voice messages for future delivery
• make calls to a telephone or paging service to notify the user a message has arrived in his/her mailbox
• transfer callers to another phone number for personal assistance
• play different message greetings to different callers.

Storage

Voicemail messages are stored on hard disk drives, media generally used by computers to store other forms of data. Messages are recorded in digitized natural human voice similar to how music is stored on a CD. To retrieve messages, a user calls the system from any phone, logs on using Touch-tones (clearing security), and his messages can be retrieved immediately. Many users can retrieve or store messages at the same time on the same voicemail system.

Many voicemail systems also offer an automated attendant facility. Automated attendants enable callers to a “main” business number to access directory service or self-route the call to various places such as a specific department, an extension number, or to an informational recording in a voice mailbox, etc.

History of voicemail

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

First solutions did not work

Neither email messaging nor cellular phones were widespread in the 1970s and 80s, and did not really begin to flourish until the mid-1990s. The initial solution to the phone communication problem for businesses 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.