I want to make an answering machine that allows me to record a persons name via a microphone and then when the machine detectes their numer it speaks "john jones calliong". Is there a project like this available? I used to have a Phillips answering machine that did this but it broke and is no longer available. So, I guess I have to make my own. Surely there is an arduino project that does this
Hooking stuff up to the phone lines has a lot of legal issues around it. So there's not a lot of home-brew telephone equipment out there. You will have to have a network interface device on your line at the very least. The rest sort of depends on where you live.
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If such a project does not already exist you can search this forum for "caller id" and "speaking clock". With a combination of these two bases you should be able to build something which meets your requirements.
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Could use a Whooz It box, has a serial output..
Used them in pos software, food deliveries..
Land lines are a bit old school, but i checked boxes are still available..
It spits out the caller id info in serial format..
I was using Whooz It 4 lines..
They do have a 2 line boxes and yes, their pricey, but they do work..
Good luck.. ~q
I did this exact project years ago. It demodulated the incoming Caller-ID packets between the first and second rings, looked up the calling number in a database, and then for a match it would "announce" the caller's name. I also had entries that announced as "Spam". Or if there was no match it would announce the calling number. I used the extra twisted pair in my house's telephone wiring, with a few speakers, as the audio distribution network, so I could hear it anywhere in the house.
But this was long before the advent of things like Arduinos, or for that matter, the Internet. It used a dedicated Commodore C-16 (with ram expanded to 64K). And it used primitive Commodore-level text-to-speech software, so it sounded pretty awful. No, that's not right. It was "phonemes-to-audio".
I no longer have any of the documentation for that project. I think you can buy Caller-ID decoder modules on Ebay or Aliexpress, but I think they are pretty expensive. But I bet you could find, essentially for free, an old XT laptop that has a "voicemodem" built in. It would provide the line interface and CID decoding, and you could write the software in VBScript or something similar. And I think XP even has a text-to-speech function built in.
I've also done a few of these projects and one is still in use. These are Arduino based (ESP8266 and ATmega328P) including the demodulator, however, I did not add voice announcement.
- Esp8266 Arduino Telephone Caller ID system with anti-spam feature
- Arduino telephone caller ID system
I also produced a java script tool for generating the caller ID signalling (Bell Modem) for testing the modem.
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I know this is old, but in case anyone still cares.. I would recommend if you want the callerID info, but dont want to pay for that expensive "whoozit" or whatever box, just open up an old caller ID box (the older the better because it will be less integrated!) and there will be a decoder chip in there that does the decoding of the audio signal to pass the raw serial data to the microcontroller at TTL levels. I did this way back in the 80s, and basically wired just that output through a MAX232 chip to get it to old fashioned +/-12v RS232 levels to hook to a PC serial port. You wouldn't even have to do that these days as the levels should be compatible with a 5v GPIO pin on an arduino and work with a soft serial input.
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