How to Setup an Internet Telephone Answering Machine
I have been finding it difficult to keep in touch with my friends and family, because they do not use E-mail or they are rarely around to take calls when I am awake. Therefore, I setup my own Internet telephone answering machine to make it easier to stay in contact with people from the UK. This is how I did it.
Choice 1: Setup SkypeIn
Skype allows you to make and receive free voice and video calls using an Internet connection. SkypeOut is an extra faciltity that lets you make cheap international calls to landlines and cell phones. SkypeIn lets friends use telephones to dial a local number, but they are actually patched through to your Skype account on the computer. If you are not online or busy, this service will take a voice message for you. I only paid $12 for a 3 month subscription to a SkypeIn number. There is an annual SypeIn option that costs $38. I setup a UK number, which I will send to friends so they can ring me or leave a message from time to time.
Choice 2: Setup a Jaxtr Account
Perhaps you want telephone voicemail, but do not want to give out a private number. This is where Jaxtr comes in. You setup an account and then Jaxtr gives you a link, which you can share with people who might call or leave a message. When someone clicks on the link, they are given a local number to call that is different from your real telephone number. You can get your Jaxtr account to link to your telephone number, but China is not yet one of Jaxtr’s listed countries. You can not link the service to a Chinese telephone number. I got round this obstacle by using my getting a UK number using SkypeIn. The basic service is free and it gives you a 100 minutes a month of talk or message time. I like this service, because you can embed the link in your blog, webpage or E-mail.
Konstantin from Jaxtr kindly corrected a mistake I made about needing to have a telephone number to use the service by leaving the following comment.
Adding a phone number is optional in jaxtr. You can just skip the step and use it as a voice mail box in any country. However, to get live calls on your mobile phone, you need to be in one of the 29 supported countries (and we are working to support China). Another important difference is that if you give people a phone number, then friends abroad have to make international calls to reach you at that number. With jaxtr, we automatically assign domestic numbers to each of your friends when they call you for the first time via your widget, so they don’t have to pay international phone charges, which can be expensive–especially when calling from a mobile phone.
Choice 3: Odeo Voice Messages
When you setup an account an Odeo account, it gives you a webpage that your friends can log onto in order to record a voice message. You record the message using a little flash widget. The service seems easy enough to use and you can embed links in the same way as Jaxtr, but my main machine runs Linux Ubuntu. For some reason, the record facility does not seem to work at the moment.
If anyone wants to send me a Jaxtr voice message, please feel free to click on the “send voicemail” link. Alternatively, you can open this link to record an Odeo message for me.
Posted: February 7th, 2007 under Internet, technology.
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