Voicemail systems vary from provider to provider, however I find that the majority of systems offer WAY too many options for incoming callers. I have the sneaking suspicion that there is a micro economic incentive to keep voicemail menus long. With several million subscribers, wireless providers can rake in extra cash when those seconds add up to over-limit minutes. Yes, some companies offer a "press * or # to bypass" option, but not all of them, not enough of them for my taste. This sucks.

Some users appreciate options. Others may be Luddites or elderly, and require a bit of handholding to leave a message properly. For me, and I suspect others like me, let's get one thing straight - I just want the beep. I do not want to page this person, leave a callback number. Also, I am not doing ADR work on a film, so I don't need to review my message with the option of re-recording it if I don't like it. I don't need to know what this person is doing at the moment. Either I get them on the line, or I get my goddamn beep.

If caller-ID is de-facto with most providers, why not a voicemail limiter ID? It would work like this. You set up your phone account with a voicemail limiter flag. This gets encoded into the incoming call data or happens during the switching. When you dial a number, the system sees that you are indeed a savvy user and sends you forthwith to the beep. If this is something that requires too much inter-carrier infrastructure (which it is not, considering what they have to do with number rollovers, etc) how about a NLP voice recognition that will understand it when I scream "Where's the beep?" into the phone as the canonical list of voicemail options drones into my ear.
-- tourist, Nov 11 2005

Paul English: IVR Cheat Sheet to Find a Human http://www.paulenglish.com/ivr/
Tricks to bypassing voive mail jail--US centric. [bristolz, Nov 11 2005]

Updated link http://gethuman.com/sitemap.html
[normzone, May 05 2006]

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