Voice-mail - Voice-mail Invention

Voice-mail Invention

The first public records describing voice recording were reported in a New York newspaper and the Scientific American in November, 1877. Thomas A. Edison had announced the invention of his "phonograph" saying "the object was to record telephone messages and transmit them again by telephone." Edison applied for a U. S. patent on December 1877 and shortly thereafter demonstrated the machine to publishers, the U.S. congress and President Hayes, recording and playing "Mary had a little lamb... " and "there was a little girl who had a little curl... " and other ditties popular at the time. In an article outlining his own ideas of the future usefulness of his machine Edison's list began with "Letter writing, and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer." In other words, "voice messages" or "Voice-mail". By 1914, Edison's phonograph business included a dictating machine (the Ediphone) and the "Telescribe", a machine combining the phonograph and the telephone, which recorded both sides of telephone conversations.Edison A Biography, Mathew Josephson Chapter 9http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edcyldr.html

For nearly one hundred years, there were few innovations or advances in telephone services. Voice-mail was the result of innovations in telephone products and services made possible by developments in computer technologies during the 1970s. These innovations began with the Motorola Pageboy, a simple "pager" or "beeper" introduced in 1974 that was generally offered in conjunction with answering services that handled busy / no-answer overloads and after hours calls for businesses and professionals. Operators wrote down a caller's message, sent a page alert or "beep" and when the party called back, an operator dictated the message.

With the introduction of "voice" pagers, like the Motorola Pageboy II operators could transmit a voice message directly to the pager and the user could hear the message. However, messages arrival was often untimely and privacy issues as well as the high cost eventually caused the demise of these services. By the mid 1970s digital storage and analog to digital conversion devises had emerged and paging companies began handling client messages electronically. Operators recorded a short message (5–6 seconds, e.g. "please call Mr. Smith") and the messages were delivered automatically when the client called the answering service. It would only take a short step for the first voice-mail application to be born.

Computer manufacturers, telephone equipment manufacturers and software firms began developing more sophisticated solutions as more powerful and less expensive computer processors and storage devices became available.. This set the stage for a creation of a broad spectrum of computer based Central Office and Customer Premise Equipment that would eventually support enhanced voice solutions such as voice-mail, audiotex, interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition solutions that began emerging in the 1980s. However, broad adoption of these products and services would depend on the global proliferation of touch tone phones and mobile phone services which would not occur until the late 1980s.