Talk:Voicemail

This article was proposed for deletion December 2004. The discussion is archived at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Voice Mail.

Revision proposed by Bob Cohn

Hi, I received an email from Bob Cohn suggesting the following version. He's edited the complete article in a word doc and sent it over email. Since, this would be a massive change. I leave it here for a while before moving it in parts to the article. From the text, it appears that he was an early player in the development of Voicemail. I've asked him for references to this effect. -- Sundar ^{\talk \contribs} 09:59, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Voicemail (or voice mail or vmail) is a centralized system of managing telephone messages for a large group of people. In its simplest form it mimics the functions of an answering machine, but uses a centralized, computerized system rather than equipment at the individual telephone. Voice mail systems are much more sophisticated than answering machines in that they can answer many phones at the same time, enable users to forward messages to another voice mailbox, send messages to multiple voice mailboxes, add voice notes to a message, store messages for future delivery, make calls to a telephone or paging service when a message is received, transfer callers to another phone for personal assistance and play different message greetings to different callers. Voicemail messages are stored on hard disk drives, media generally used by computers to store other forms of data. Messages are recorded in natural human voice. To retrieve messages, a user logs on (clearing security) and his/her messages can be retrieved immediately. Many users can retrieve or store messages at the same time on the same voice mail system Many voicemail systems also offer an automated attendant facility, allowing callers answered by the system to be routed a department, or to a selected person's mail box or telephone. The enabling technologies for voice mail were fast processors, higher capacity less expensive disk drives, and practically priced chips that converted voice to numerical data and vice versa.

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 implementation of voicemail support fax and are integrated into e-mail systems.

THE NEED FOR VOICE MAIL: In the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, the cost of making a phone call decreased and more business communication was 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, communication was stifled by the callers being unable to reach people. Some early studies showed that only 1 in 4 phone calls resulted in a complete call. This happened because people were either not at work (due to time zone differences), or if they were at work, they were on the phone, away from their desks in meetings, or were on breaks, etc. This bottleneck was stifling the effectiveness of businesses and decreasing productivity.

FIRST SOLUTIONS DIDN’T WORK: Neither email nor cellular phones existed at that time. The initial solution to the phone communication problem was the message center. A message center was a centralized 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 to whom that extension belonged.

Operators were busy and often huge volumes of calls would come in at the same time. This left them little time to take each message, plus they weren’t familiar with people’s names or how to 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.

Tape answering machines had come onto the 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/her phone, messages had to be retrieved in sequential order, messages couldn't be retrieved remotely (with answering machines pre-dating voice mail), and messages couldn't be forwarded to others. As manufacturers of PBX’s (private branch exchanges – the name for corporate phone systems) introduced proprietary electronic phone sets, answering machines couldn’t be connected to them like they could with normal home phones.

VOICE MAIL SOLVED THE COMMUNICATION PROBLEM: Voice mail enables people to leave lengthy and detailed messages in natural voice, securely, and works hand-in-hand with corporate phone systems. Voice mail has two main modes of operation: telephone answering and voice messaging. Telephone answering mode answers outside calls and takes a message from any outside caller (either because the extension was busy or rang no-answer). Voice messaging enables any subscriber (someone with a mailbox number) to send messages to any or many subscribers without first calling them. Both of these modes are described below.

Telephone answering mode: Suppose an outside caller (let’s call him “Phil”) calls someone in a company (let’s call him “Fred”). If Fred’s phone rings no answer or busy, the PBX will forward the call to the voice mail system. Somehow the PBX needs to tell the voice mail system that Fred’s phone is the one that’s being forwarded so the voice mail system can answer with Fred’s personal greeting. Without this information, the voice mail system would have no idea whose phone it was answering. Once a message is left, the voice mail system illuminates the message waiting light on Fred’s phone. It does this by sending a signal to the PBX to tell it which light to light. When Fred returns to his desk (or calls in remotely) he is presented only with messages left for him. Once the messages are played, the voice mail system signals the PBX to turn off the message waiting light on Fred’s phone.

Early voice mail systems (notably those made by IBM and VMX) could not answer outside calls. As the subsequent systems emerged (ROLM and Octel), the voice mail systems could answer outside calls but most PBX’s did not provide signaling to tell the voice mail system which extension it was forwarding, nor did they support telephones with message waiting lights.

Voice messaging: this mode is to phones what email is to computers. Messages are sent to other users by calling the voice mail system rather than the user’s phone. For example, suppose two employees (Fred and Mary) are working on a project. Fred gets some information that Mary should have, but doesn’t want to phone her and talk to her – he just wants to give her the information. Rather than phone her, Fred calls the voice mail system, logs on with his number and password, and records a message to Mary in his own voice. He tells the voice mail system to send it to Mary by keying in her mailbox number (same as her extension) or spelling her name. The message is immediately put in Mary’s voice mailbox without her phone ever ringing. The message waiting light on her phone immediately comes on telling her there is a message. Fred can send this message just to Mary, to Mary and any number of additional employees, or to group lists which contain any number of pre-programmed names and numbers. The same message can be sent to thousands of people. Additional features are available, like marking a message urgent, private or asking for notification the message has been picked up.

HISTORY OF CORPORATE VOICE MAIL: Voice mail was first invented by IBM (Dr. Steven J. Boies) but was commercialized by Octel Communications (founded by Bob Cohn and Peter Olson). ROLM Corporation (founded by Gene Richeson, Ken Oshman, Walter Lowenstern and Bob Maxfield) was the first PBX manufacturer to offer integrated voice mail and also played a major role commercializing voice mail.

IBM’s product was developed as a lab experiment to mimic the concept of email, but using the telephone as the input device and the human voice as the medium. IBM’s product was not offered for sale for quite some time after it was invented. Eventually it was marketed as the Audio Distribution System (ADS), both directly by IBM and for a short while by AT&T. IBM's ADS was based on the IBM Series 1 Computer and required special attention as a computer (special room, special power, air conditioning, etc.) ADS was richly featured for voice messaging, but had major limitations which resulted in its failure as a commercial product: it was physically large, was expensive, was limited to 1,000 users, had no telephone answering mode (could not answer outside calls), and had to be taken out of service to make changes to the user data base (called "MAC", for "moves, adds and changes").

Concurrent with IBM’s development of ADS, Delphi Communications of California developed a customer service system which incorporated a form of voice mail in its product. The company only produced one system, then the company failed.

After ADS was developed, but before it was first offered for commercial sale, a company was founded by Gordon Matthews called ECS Communications (the name was later changed to VMX). Gordon Matthews had possibly been inspired by Delphi Communications, a company he had tried to be involved with earlier. ECS produced a higher capacity voice messaging system and claimed to be the first to offer voice mail. This system also could not answer outside calls and was physically enormous. Matthews, a prolific entrepreneur and patenter, applied for and was granted a patent on voice mail (patent number 4,371,752 granted in February, 1983).

Roughly simultaneously several companies sprang up to develop voice mail systems including Wang Computers, ROLM, Opcom, Octel, Centigram, Genesys, and many others. Wang Computers, under the leadership of Dr. Larry Bergeron, developed a voice mail system modeled after the IBM system. Wang called its system the DVX. It too could not answer outside calls but was smaller and less expensive than the IBM system. Matthews tried to assert his patent with IBM and then Wang, but both companies were able to invalidate the Matthews patent because of prior art. Matthews cleverly achieved a settlement where the patent was let stand, not challenged in court and both IBM and Wang received royalty-free licenses to all VMX patents. IBM and Wang also cross licensed a number of trivial patents to VMX. VMX then continued to assert (incorrectly) that it had invented voice mail and that Matthews was the father of voice mail. Following the settlement with Wang, VMX settled with Octel in exchange for no further litigation on the patent.

ROLM (one of the first makers of digital PBX’s) was the first company to offer integrated voice mail through its product called PhoneMail. ROLM’s digital PBX was the first PBX to provide signaling to indicate which extension was being forwarded to a voice mail system (the first PBX to do so). However, the signaling was proprietary and intended only for use by its voice mail product, PhoneMail. ROLM’s PBX also provided signaling to enable PhoneMail to illuminate a message waiting light on ROLM’s electronic phones and later standard phones equipped with message waiting lights. PhoneMail only worked with some of the ROLM PBX’s, would not work with any other brand of PBX, and was heavily promoted by ROLM.

Opcom, a company started by David Ladd, was another maker of voice mail and patented the feature of automated attendant. Opcom primarily offered a smaller voice mail system marketed to smaller enterprises. Automated attendant enables callers to direct calls by pressing single digit keys. For example, “If you are making domestic reservations, press ‘1’; for international reservations, press ‘2’; for frequent flier information, press ‘3’, etc.” This is not technically voice mail, but all the features to enable automated attendant are already part of a voice mail system so it was a natural feature to add to it.

Octel’s voice mail system (which was developed during the period from 1982-1984 and was first sold in 1984), became the clear market leader fairly quickly. It used a substantially different hardware and software architecture which enabled Octel’s systems to be physically smaller, faster, more reliable, and much less costly to build than any other vendor. The features which gave Octel market leadership were: User-friendly user-interface (other systems were not intuitive and had no help prompts). Error-free touch-tone detection (other systems falsely detected a touch tone out of human voice, or didn’t detect touch-tones when users pressed the buttons). Scrambled messages so no one could hear anyone else’s messages (other systems could accidentally get other people’s messages if the system failed at the right time). Telephone answering, voice messaging and automated attendant. Moves, adds and changes while the system was running. Large amounts of message storage. Physically small machines (about the size of a 2-drawer filing cabinet, compared to ROLM’s PhoneMail being about 5’ x 5’ x 5’ and VMX’s system filling a computer room). No requirement for special environment. Octel systems could be located in any office environment and they were not susceptible to electrical shocks (often common on carpeted floors in offices, especially during winter). High reliability (being the first voice mail system to achieve up-time of 99.9% with its first system). Compatible with over 85 brands of PBX (voice mail offered by PBX vendors could only work with that vendor’s PBX system). Telephone answering with all PBX’s, even those which had no method of providing caller ID. Message notification (phoning subscribers at various locations pre-programmed by the subscriber, when messages were received). Small, medium, large and extra large systems which addressed the needs of major companies (For example, Octel’s systems had 50% greater capacity than VMX’s largest system, and 15-20 times that of ROLM’s largest system). Small systems went in branch offices, medium systems went in district offices, large systems went in regional offices, and extra large systems could handle large corporate headquarters with over 10,000 people. Networking between voice mail systems so companies could have their voice mail systems operate as one large virtual network.

Octel’s strategy addressed needs of major accounts which other vendors did not: advanced training, customer service, sales and market education. Octel’s system could identify the extension number of calls being forwarded to it and light message-waiting lights on most PBX’s. This was possible because Octel’s engineers reverse engineered the major brands of PBX (legally) and often figured out ways to communicate with the PBX in ways the PBX manufacturer had not. Eventually most makers of PBX chose to work cooperatively with Octel. Octel integrated with almost 100 brands of PBX worldwide. As a result of Octel’s worldwide leadership, its user interface (which was done in more than 75 languages and dialects) became the most widely known corporate voice mail in the world.

Toward the late 1990’s, Octel pioneered the concept of Visual Mailbox and Unified Messaging. Visual Mailbox enabled users to manage their voice mailboxes through their PC’s, although the messages were still stored on the Octel system. Unified Messaging built voice mail into Microsoft Exchange, the corporate email system made by Microsoft. Users could see the “header information” (sender, date sent, subject) of voice mails along with emails on their email inbox. Emails had a little envelope icon next to them; voice mails had a little telephone next to them. Users could listen to voice messages through their phones or on their PCs, or have emails read to them through their phone (in synthesized voice), Voice messages were sent using email or telephone addressing schemes and they used the data networking infrastructure rather than the public switched telephone network. Unified Messaging didn’t take off because (at the time) email did not enjoy a huge market share, email servers were not very reliable, internet connections were slow (voice messages were large files) and most PCs did not have speakers or microphones.

HISTORY OF VOICE MAIL ON CELL PHONES AND HOMES: Until 1988, telephone companies and the newly formed cellular phone companies were barred by law from offering voice mail to their subscribers. This was done by the FCC to protect the telephone answering businesses around the country. This prohibition continued with the decree which broke up AT&T in 1984. A subsequent ruling by Judge Harold Greene in 1988 reversed this barrier since voice mail offered by carriers was ultimately much more effective for consumers than answering service companies. Phone companies were allowed to offer voice mail as a service, but they were barred from designing or manufacturing the machines that could provide the service.

VMX’s large system was used by a few carriers, but severe reliability and cost issues prevented VMX from expansion to the carrier market. Octel already had very high capacity systems for corporate use and by 1988 all seven Regional Bell Operating companies were using Octel for internal use. Octel first adapted its largest system for the carriers, which enabled them to offer reliable voice mail to their subscribers. Within a year, Octel launched a new generation of its large system specifically designed for carriers which was compliant with “NEBS standards”, the tight standard required by phone companies for any equipment located in their central offices. A few other manufacturers entered the voice mail market for carriers including Unisys, Boston Technology (founded by Scott Jones) and Comverse Technology (an Israeli based company founded by Kobi Alexander). These vendors did not offer voice mail to corporations. None of the other corporate voice mail manufacturers had any success with the carrier market because their systems’ capacities were too small and the equipment wasn’t reliable enough. Selling to carriers also required a different method of sales and marketing than selling to the corporate market, and only Octel succeeded at both.

The first cellular carrier to offer voice mail to its subscribers was Bell Cellular, the Canadian carrier serving Ontario and Quebec (Bell Cellular later changed its name to Bell Mobility). Bell Cellular’s success with voice mail caught on, and cellular voice mail spread throughout Canada and then to the US and overseas. 100% of Canadian cellular companies ultimately used Octel voice mail, followed by a majority of US carriers (including AT&T and McCaw) and a large percent of the GSM carriers around the world. The Octel user interface became the most common in the world on carriers.

Other interesting markets developed from the carrier market including a concept called “virtual telephony”. Many emerging countries did not have many telephones. Wiring for telephones was very expensive, and many poorer citizens didn’t have homes to wire. The economies of emerging countries were held back because people couldn’t communicate beyond the area where they could walk or ride a bicycle. Giving them phones was one way to help their economies, but there wasn’t a practical way to do it. Cellular phones weren’t an option then because they were extremely expensive (thousands of dollars per handset) and the infrastructure to install cell sites was also costly. Octel pioneered a concept called Virtual Telephony which used voice mail to provide phone service rapidly without wiring for telephones. Each person could be given a phone number and a voice mailbox. The citizen would be given a pager. If someone called the phone number, it would be answered by the voice mail message and the caller could leave a long, detailed message. As soon as the message was received, the voice mail system would trigger the citizen’s pager. When the page was received, the citizen would find a pay phone and call in to pick up the message. This concept was used successfully in South America and South Africa.

CONSOLIDATION: In the early ’80’s there were over 30 companies vying for the corporate voice mail market including many companies no longer in business today. These companies included IBM, VMX, Wang, Octel, ROLM, AT&T, Northern Telecom, Voice and Data Systems, Commterm, Genesys, Brook Trout, AVT, AVST, Digital Sound, Centigram, Voice Mail International, and many others. Virtually all contenders in the corporate voice mail market were based in the United States.

By the mid ‘90’s, IBM and Wang exited the voice mail market because they couldn’t get enough traction. ROLM was purchased by IBM but sold soon thereafter to Siemens. VMX suffered from poor product and ineffective management and was about to fold when Opcom merged with it. The surviving company was called VMX, but VMX was all but erased by Opcom except for its name and patent portfolio. In 1994, Octel bought VMX. AT&T created its version of voice mail for the corporate market (called Audix) but it would only work on AT&T PBX’s. Northern Telecom developed Meridian Mail and followed the same strategy as AT&T in that Meridian Mail only worked with Northern Telecom PBX’s. As a result, neither company achieved much market share with large national or multi-national accounts (because few, if any, had only one brand of PBX). AT&T spun off its equipment business into a company called Lucent Technologies, and Northern Telecom changed its name to Nortel. Several small companies offering voice mail folded because of inadequate product and/or management.

By the mid-1990’s, Octel had become the number one supplier of voice mail both to corporations and to carriers. It had about a 60% market share in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan (for large corporations) and between a 30% and 100% of the carrier market, depending on the country. By 1997 Octel’s biggest competitors were Audix, made by Lucent, and Meridian Mail, made by Nortel. In July of 1997, Octel was purchased by Lucent Technology. Lucent’s AUDIX division was merged into Octel to form the Octel Messaging Division. In the same year, Boston Technology was acquired by Comverse Technology making it the second largest supplier to carriers after Octel. In a few years Comverse became the largest supplier to carriers with Lucent holding its leadership in the corporate market and second place with carriers. By 2000, some estimate that there were over 150,000,000 active users of voice mail made by the Octel Messaging Division. Shortly thereafter, Lucent spun off its corporate business, including the Octel Messaging Division, into a company known as Avaya.

VOICE MAIL TODAY: By the turn of the century (2000), voice mail had become a ubiquitous feature on phone systems serving companies, cellular and residential subscribers. Cellular and residential voice mail continue today in their previous form, primarily simple telephone answering. Corporate voice mail did not change much until the advent of Voice Over IP (VoIP – voice being transmitted over the internet). This technology changed the style and technology of PBX’s and the way voice mail systems integrate with them. Email became the prevalent messaging system, email servers and software became quite reliable, and virtually all office workers were equipped with multi-media PCs. This enabled a new generation of Unified Messaging which is likely to catch on widely because the reliability, speed and convenience is now possible where it wasn’t before. The corporate voice mail market is served by several vendors including Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, Mitel, 3Com, Adomo, and AVST. The carrier market is dominated by Comverse Technology with some share still held by Lucent Technologies.