Call centres which put people on what appears to be terminal hold try the patience of the best of us. This telephone will remove all the mind-numbing tedium and ear-blasting muzak in a stroke.

The main functionality of the phone is to detect when a real human is on the other end of the line. This based on a number of factors:

1) When the phone stops ringing
2) When the muzak stops playing
3) When there is a voice which is not part of the automated system

The third part would be trickiest to implement, but I'm confident that call centres use such repetitive recordings of the same not-quite-human voice that current voice-recognition technology could be trained to filter these out. When first put on hold, simply take a sample of the system's voice.

You can then walk away from the phone and it will alert you when your call is answered, allowing you to get on with your life in the meantime. If you think it may take a short while to get back to the phone you could record the first line of what you wish to say, and the phone would play this back once there's a pause in the speech on the other end of the line.
-- -alx, Aug 30 2002

Why this isn't baked yet is a complete mystery to me.
-- RayfordSteele, Aug 30 2002


When I can, I put the held line on speakerphone, which at least allows me to put down the handset and do something else (other than make another phone call, of course).

Direct marketers' automated dialing systems detect when a live person picks up, so the technology is out there for that part.
-- DrCurry, Aug 30 2002


You people that don't answer the phone within 20 seconds with your actual voice do wonders for my call handling times.
-- polartomato, Aug 30 2002


As I write this anno, I've been on hold for about an hour, with no knowing when the other side will end the hold. So, I certainly had time to think up this exact Idea. However, noting that the date of this Idea is 2002, I have one slight advantage over the common phones of that era, in that my phone is both portable and has a "speaker" function, so I can at least set the thing down and type this while listening to the repeating hold messages.

Also, it occurs to me that this Idea was written before smartphones became popular, and therefore, very likely, it should be possible to create a phone "app" to do the detecting of the end of a hold, and the alerting of you who activated the app.
-- Vernon, Aug 30 2016


This has been baked for many years now. Unfortunately, as a non-phone-user, I don't know what it's called.
-- notexactly, Aug 31 2016



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