Advanced Call Center is a full-featured yet easy-to-use answering machine software for your voice modem. All necessary functions are supported: Caller ID lets you see and hear who's calling via screen pop-ups, distinctive rings, call recording, and caller's name announcement with speech synthesis. "Black" and "white" list functions filter calls based on caller database, call origin and other parameters.

You can map personalized greetings to callers, organize information in phone books and record conversations.

Advanced features include pager notification, sending call details and voice messages over e-mail, and starting an external fax program when an incoming fax call is recognized.

Tightly integrating voice modem with the sound card, Advanced Call Center offers a feature that leading competitors do not - real time voice transfer from telephone line to PC sound system, so you don't need an extra speaker attached to the modem! Runs as a tray application when idle, uses minimum system resources, and automatically frees the modem for an Internet connection. Lastly, Advanced Call Center looks just as great as it.

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Features:

Advanced Call Center utilizes your modem and Caller ID detection (also known as Calling Number Delivery) to identify incoming telephone callers. Caller ID is a service that lets you screen your calls, so you only answer the call when you want to.

The program supports Caller ID systems used in the US and Canada, the United Kingdom (British Telecom), Australia and New Zealand. Click here for a list of supported modems

The program maintains a telephone number database including custom sound alerts for a caller, as well as other caller's details. It provides a per-caller customizable ring alert sound and a pop-up window to notify you about an incoming call.

Call can be accepted or rejected by you or by the program itself. You won't even hear rings from blacklisted callers, once they are identified. The program is able to block unwanted calls, including blocked (private) numbers, out of area calls and those calls that were not identified.

Advanced Call Center works with Number Only Caller ID service as well as with Name and Number service. It is able to match the phone number against names that you store in a phone book. This allows users with Number Only Caller ID to see the name of the caller or substitute Caller ID name with more readable one.

Built-in Address Book

Once you have entered the details in the Advanced Call Center Address Book, every time you receive a call, their name and telephone number will appear. You will hear a distinctive ring pattern once you assign that caller a unique ring sound or melody. You can even block an unwanted caller by automatically redirecting calls from that telephone number to the answering machine.

Smart Software Answering Machine

Advanced Call Center features extensive call answering capabilities. Incoming calls may be recorded and saved to a WAV file, which can be played back by the program or the standard Windows Media Player / Sound Recorder. You can monitor the current conversation through the sound card.

When the telephone rings, Caller ID information is received as a series of special codes after the first or second ring. The program attempts to match the caller's identity with it's internal database. Depending on the caller's status (White listed, Normal or Black listed), and group options set, the call can be routed to the answering machine, answered normally with the handset, or even dropped immediately. Individual entries in the database can be assigned personalized greetings.

In telephone answering machine mode, callers hear a greeting message and a beep after which they may record a voice message. The allowable recording time can be adjusted from a few seconds to several hours. When a caller disconnects, the program stops recording and hangs up. Greeting messages can be customized depending on per-caller basis.

The program can record all or part of the conversation to a sound file, and play it back to the recipient or through the local sound card at any time.

There are several actions that can be assigned for every type of calls: hang up/do not answer, block the call (your telephone stops ringing), answer immediately or after specified number of rings, record message or start answering machine sequence; set caller on hold and play music. It is possible to set up the program to record all incoming calls and every call originated from within ACC.

Remote Access to Messages

It is possible to control the answering machine remotely. Remotely available actions include message retrieval, leaving a message, changing the default greeting, and more.

Recorded answering machine messages can be heard remotely from any touch-tone telephone via Remote Retrieval function

Call Forwarding

Advanced Call Center is able to notify the user about an incoming call via numeric or alpha-numeric pager and/or via e-mail. E-mail announce can include full voice message left by remote party to the answering machine as a wave file. It is possible to forward different callers to different e-mail addresses, or selectively block paging or mailing of a caller.

Voice Announce

The program can announce call details in voice. When someone calls in, their name and/or telephone number will be announced by computer's voice. This is useful if you are in another room and wish to know who is calling. You can then choose to answer or not.

Features List

• Caller ID software
• Answering machine software
• Phone dialer and phone book
• Background operation in system tray

Identifying Who's Calling

• Caller ID informs you of who's calling before you answer
• Three types of incoming calls: white listed, normal and blacklisted
• International phone numbers and dates supported
• Custom formatting of telephone numbers and Caller ID names capitalization
• Audible warning when incoming call is detected
• Custom individual Greetings and Incoming Ring sounds for each caller
• Complete history of all calls received or made
• American, British Telecom, DTMF Caller ID and Russian ANI support

Message Notification

• Text to Speech voice announcements let you know who's calling when you're away from the computer
• Notification of a new call via e-mail or pager
• Numeric and alphanumeric pager support
• E-mail call forwarding, including the voice message
• Multiple variants of visual notification, including two types of pop-up dialogs, a tool tip window, and mail window activation 

Answering Machine Software and Telephony

• Standard wave files input/output
• Custom greeting messages for each specific caller
• Call screening capability: the program can use a sound card to allow you screening incoming calls as they occur
• Playing back modem-recorded messages through your modem or sound card
• Programmable answering machine functions
• 'Hold line' feature with custom message or music played to the remote caller
• Optional full automatic recording of each phone call (incoming or outgoing) 
• Full remote access to recorded messages from any touch-tone phone

Managing Your Contacts

• A powerful built-in Phone Book including telephone number database
• Unlimited number of contacts
• Database Import/Export capability
• Three types of incoming calls: white listed, normal and blacklisted 

Dial-out Capabilities

• Ability to place calls using the modem dial-out features
• Tone and pulse dialing
• Auditioning the outgoing calls made using the program

System Requirements:

Voice Modems in Windows

Support for voice modems in Windows operating systems is limited. This is explained by the limitations imposed by the voice modems, as well as the limitations of their drivers.

Microsoft provided telephony developers with a way to access all telephony devices, such as telephony boards or voice modems, in a unified manner. This set of interfaces is called TAPI (Telephony Application Programming Interface). Particularly for voice modems, a 'Unimodem' (a universal modem driver), and later a voice capable version 'Unimodem V', was developed. Unimodem was designed to work with any modem, but it has severe limitations.

Microsoft never supplied a voice enabled version of TAPI for Windows NT, meaning that there is no voice mode support under NT4. Later versions of operating systems do support voice mode.

Limitations Of Voice Modems

Voice modems vary considerably in quality as far as voice functions are concerned. Data and fax communications with modems tends to be reliable and have few significant limitations apart from speed. The modems were originally designed for data and fax applications, voice functionality being added to some models as an extra sales feature rather than as a primary function. The quality of different modem models from the same manufacturer can also vary from good to very poor, and as the manufacturers seem to change their models on such a regular basis, it makes it very difficult to recommend the best modems to use.

The main limitations are:

• Poor audio quality, varies from poor to acceptable.
• An often reported problem is that audio plays through speakers not modem.
• Long initial start-up delays when playing and recording, varies from acceptable to sometimes seconds.
• Often no volume or gain control on the line audio.
• Unreliable DTMF tone detection, necessary for IVR applications.
• No ring back signalling.
• Unreliable busy detection, depends on the country the modem was principally designed for.
• Modems signal connected immediately after dialling is completed, before the call is answered and even if the call is busy. If the call is busy, after the connected signal you may receive a busy signal.
• Unreliable or non-existent remote party hang-up (end-of-call) signaling. Modems can not detect the Loop Disconnect hang-up signal of standard POTS CO's. Only if the CO also sends rapid busy can the modem detect that the remote party has disconnected and even then only if the modem can detect that particular rapid busy tone.
• Unreliable Call Transfer with call transfers that use a hook flash.
• Caller ID standards vary from country to country, modems often only support the US standard.
• Lack of Phone devices. About a half of voice modems on the market support a speaker phone device, but as far no modems support "Handset" or "Headset" devices. Handset is the term TAPI uses for a normal local telephone set.
• Most modems have a socket to connect a local telephone, but this phone cannot be controlled or monitored in any way by the application. The application is not able to detect when the handset is lifted or replaced. The application cannot control the speech path or play or record audio from the handset; some modems disconnect the local phone when the modem is off-hook.
• Installing multiple modems to support multiple phone lines is unreliable and mainly unsupported by modem manufacturers. Many modem drivers will not support installing two modems of the same kind.
• Other problems with some modems are for example, the line dropping after a wave file has been played, DTMF detection failing after a wave file has been played, etc. These sorts of problems are actual faults with the modem or their driver files provided by the manufacturer, and never occur with more professional telephony hardware.
• Modems often have an incorrectly configured inf file drivers supplied by the manufacturer. They often indicate capabilities that the modem does not have, such as a speakerphone or Caller ID. More often they do not indicate capabilities supported by the modem, which is the most common reason for IVR applications to fail executing on such systems.

List of Compatible Voice Modems

After extensive testing of multiple units provided by various manufacturers, we concluded that Way2Call HiPhone Desktop and Stylus devices, while not being exactly voice modems, provided the best reliability and features. www.way2call.com

External fax/voice modems ZOOM 2948L, 2945L, 2949L, and ZOOM 3049L provide the best quality and reliability among the modem hardware. Estimated price: $70-90. www.zoom.com

Among the internal models, ZOOM 3025L, 2920, 2925L, and 2928L. All ZOOM models tested were with the Lucent (Agere) chip set. Estimated price: $50 - 80. www.zoom.com

USRobotics Sportster Voice modems, while no longer manufactured, provide acceptable quality. Estimated price: $60-100. Make sure to get a voice model; Performance and Performance Pro are not compatible. www.usrobotics.com

Creative Modem Blaster 56 Flash II Internal Modem (Conexant chip set) also provides good quality. Estimated price: $90-100. www.creative.com

Do not:

Do not use or purchase for hosting IVR applications the following types of modems.

• Win- or Soft- modems. Thus their declared features may seem enough to support an IVR application, they either do not provide the features, or they are poorly implemented. Avoid models such as "Soft56K" or "WinBlaster".
• USB modems are not generally recommended, yet there may be exceptions.