Speech Enabled Crank Phone

I’ve been meaning to write this story for a couple of
months. Mostly because I’m so grateful
to Ben Watson for restoring my phone. This phone was an antique when my parents had it. It hung on the wall in our kitchen for as
long as I remember when I was growing up. I mentioned to Ben’s daughter Angela, who works at Gold Systems, that I
had the phone and was thinking about hanging it in my office. Angela also grew up with these phones as her
dad restores them. She “volunteered” him
to make my phone work again and he graciously agreed to give it life again.

A week later it was back and hanging on my wall. I think it might be the one and only
speech-recognition-enabled crank style phone in the world. We hooked it up to our PBX so that when you
pick up the receiver, the phone automatically connects to our V-Dialer
product. You can then say the name of
anyone at Gold Systems and be connected to them without annoying touch-tone menus. We haven’t programmed V-Dialer to understand “Hello
Central” or “Mr. Watson–come here–I want to see you.”, but we could.

This week I was playing with the phone to see how many
technologies I could span with it. This
phone doesn’t represent the very first phone, but it goes back almost to the beginning
of telephony history. Now it is
connected to a modern PBX and speech recognition. If I pick up the receiver and say “Herb
Morreale”, the call is routed to Herb’s desk phone where it forwards via VoIP
to his Skype phone running on his laptop. If I pick up and say “Terry Gold on his mobile phone”, V-Dialer routes
the call to my cell phone. If I don’t
answer, the call then forwards to my laptop via Vonage and then from there to a
network voice mail server via VoIP. A
few seconds later, the voice mail shows up in my Outlook email inbox on my
laptop. If I knew someone with a
satellite phone, I think we could touch all of the existing telephone technologies
with this great old wooden wall phone.

All of this is possible because Ben gets a kick out of making
old things new again. (You should see
his T-Bird and Model-T hot rod!) Thanks
Ben. I’m really enjoying my “new”
telephone!